An Automated Router With Optical Resource Adaptation

Photonic Integrated Circuits are rapidly becoming more reconfigurable using tunable waveguide elements, coming closer to realizing ‘general purpose’ programmable waveguide meshes. To utilize the full potential of such circuits, special software routines need to be developed to determine the optical paths inside the mesh. Right now, current methods either scale exponentially in problem size or are severely lacking performance-wise, largely unable to find solutions, especially in recirculating waveguide meshes with square or hexagonal unit cells. We present an algorithm that computes an efficient configuration that correctly routes all given signals. Whereas similar papers look at meshes containing 7 to 20 hexagonal cells, in this article, meshes of up to hundreds of hexagonal cells are considered. We compare the results of our algorithm to an earlier proposed algorithm and to an optimal solution. Several parameters are introduced in the algorithm. These are studied and an optimizer is implemented to determine effective values for them.