| Authors: | W. Bogaerts | | Title: | Programmable photonic circuits : A new ecosystem for Photonic Chips | | Format: | International Conference Presentation | | Publication date: | 4/2025 | | Journal/Conference/Book: | JFS Conference
(invited)
| | Location: | Wuhan, China | | Online: | https://www.c-semi.com.cn/en/ | | Citations: | Look up on Google Scholar
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Abstract
In the past decades, photonic integrated circuits have become entrenched as a key enabling technology for fiber-optic communication. They make it possible to integrate a combination of optical and electrical functions on the surface of a chip, which can be fabricated with the same technologies used for microelectronics. The extremely large bandwidth of optical signals, and the availability of high-speed electro-optic building blocks (modulators, detectors) makes photonics a very suitable platform for the analog processing of optical and microwave signals. This is useful for communication, sensing, analog computing and many other applications. Just like electronic chips have found use in many more domains than basic computing, we expect photonic chips to find their way into these diverse application fields.
One aspect in which photonic chip technology is less advanced than its electronics counterpart is programmability: photonic chips today are fabricated for a single purpose, and each new iteration or experiment needs a new chip design. By making photonic chips programmable, like we know from field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) in digital electronics, we can accelerate the development and innovation cycles with analog signal processing, opening up the capabilities of photonic chips to a much broader engineering community.
We will introduce different classes of programmable photonic circuits, discuss the state of programmable photonics today, and illustrate this with some recent demonstrations from the work in Ghent University – IMEC. From there, we will take a look at the future, to the key challenges in the technology, but also to the opportunities to create a programmable photonic ecosystem.
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