Researchers from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and the French Institute have discovered that the silicon chip can realize programmable logic by controlling the light. Silicon photonics is the foundation of next-generation chip technology and optical communication technology, and is positioned to realize emerging applications such as optical interconnection, microwave photonic circuits, and integrated optical sensors.
Researchers believe that although photonic chips are generally “hard-wired”, the reconstruction of optical devices can make the direction of light more flexible and free, making programmable optical circuits a possibility. They said, “Spatial light modulators usually use liquid crystals or microlenses to achieve independent control of pixels. These technologies have brought a radical change to the development of optics, making it useful in the fields of imaging optics, holographic optics, and adaptive optics in recent years. A brand new application.”
Their latest research results were published in the magazine, and the team used a multimode interference device (MMI). But unlike the traditional fixed mode, they use femtosecond laser pointer to realize the dynamic mode conversion of MMI. It can realize the effective modulation of the transmitted light, so that part of the mode is passed and part of the mode is reflected.
By using a 1×2 MMI beam splitter and a projection pattern disturbed by a femtosecond laser, a 97% efficiency of light routing to a single outlet is achieved, and the device is programmable. The main researcher of the team, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southampton, commented, “Our research results prove that the programmability of the inherited optical path can be achieved by modulating light to illuminate the chip. The integrated spatial light modulator makes the traditional silicon photonics The learning device can be used as a general reconfiguration device.
described in an article published in Optica magazine that in theory, the direction of light propagation can be fully green laser pointer controlled by modulating the refractive index of the material within a certain range. The realization of this technology is similar to a field programmable logic device (FPGA). In fact, there have been some discussions about optical structures similar to FPGAs, such as microwaves and silicon nitride waveguides. All-optical FPGA analogues based on mature silicon photonics platforms have been widely used, such as wavelength division multiplexing, wavelength selection, and routing in optical communications.