Pairing of microring-based silicon photonic transceivers for tuning power optimization

Nanophotonic interconnects have started replacing traditional electrical interconnects in data centers for rack-level communications and demonstrated great potential at board and chip levels. However, microring-based silicon photonic transceivers, an important element for nanophotonic interconnects, are very sensitive to fabrication process variations, and require power hungry wavelength tuning. In this paper, we apply efficient optimization algorithms to mix-and-match a pool of fabricated transceiver devices with the objective of minimizing the overall tuning power. This optimal pairing technique, applied during the production stage, reduce power consumption for wavelength tuning. For two sets of fabricated devices, the pairs of transceivers assigned by the optimal pairing technique reduce the tuning power by 6% to 60%. We further evaluate the method on synthetic data sets that are generated from a well-established process variation model. Our experimental results show that even greater power saving can be achieved when more fabricated devices are available for pairing and the runtime of the optimization algorithm is quite scalable.