Integrated optical switch circuit operating under FPGA control

Integrated photonic circuits are enabling an abrupt step change in networking systems providing massive bandwidth and record transmission. The increasing complexity of high connectivity photonic integrated switches requires sophisticated control planes and more intimate high speed electronics. Here the first demonstration of a fabricated twenty-electrode broadcast-and-select photonic integrated switch controlled by a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is presented. Multipath 10 Gb/s data routing with rotating and pseudorandom priority path arbitration is assessed. Dynamic routing for 2.4x106 packets per second through all the working paths of the photonic integrated switch is shown using only a single external clock signal input.