Topology and investigation of a polymer 8-port optical router with scalable 7N channel wavelengths using N-stage cascading structure

Eight-port optical routers are widely used in Cluster-Mesh photonic networks-on-chip (NoC). In this paper, by using 24 groups of cross-coupling two-ring resonators, a 1-stage 8-port polymer optical router is proposed, which can optically route 7 channel wavelength data streams along definite-path in 2-D plane. Under the selected 7 channel wavelengths with standard 0.8-nm spacing, the insertion losses along all routing paths are within 0.02–0.58 dB, the maximum crosstalk of all routing operations is less than −39 dB, and the device footprint size is about 0.79 mm2. Then, to improve bandwidth capability, a universal novel structure and routing scheme of N-stage cascaded 8-port optical router are presented, which can optically routes 7N channel wavelengths. As N increases, the insertion losses of most wavelength channels increases, and a maximum N of 43 is required to drop the insertion loss below 10 dB. In this case, the maximum allowed number of wavelength channel is as large as 300. So due to good scalability in wavelength, this device shows potential application of wideband signal routing in optical NoC.