Polymeric N-stage cascaded five-port optical router with scalable 4N channel wavelengths for wideband signal routing

As basic routing element, structure and principle of cross-coupling two-ring resonator are presented, and waveguide parameters are optimized for phase-matching and single-mode propagation. Using eight-group basic elements, a new one-stage five-port polymer optical router is proposed, and it can optically route four channel wavelength data streams along definite-path in 2-D plane. Under the selected four channel wavelengths, the insertion losses along all routing paths are within 0.03-0.62 dB, the maximum crosstalk of all routing operations is less than −39 dB, and the device footprint size is about 0.31 mm2. A universal novel structure and routing scheme of N-stage cascaded five-port optical router are presented, and it contains 4N channel wavelengths that can be routed by the device. Compared with the previously reported silicon optical routers, this polymer device possesses similar ring radius (~10 μm) and device size (<1 mm2). Because of simple processing technology, low cost and good scalability, this device shows potential application of wideband signal routing in optical networks-on-chip (ONoC).