Asymptotically fault-tolerant programmable photonics

Ryan Hamerly (), Saumil Bandyopadhyay and Dirk Englund
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Ryan Hamerly: Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT
Saumil Bandyopadhyay: Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT
Dirk Englund: Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Component errors limit the scaling of programmable coherent photonic circuits. These errors arise because the standard tunable photonic coupler—the Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI)—cannot be perfectly programmed to the cross state. Here, we introduce two modified circuit architectures that overcome this limitation: (1) a 3-splitter MZI mesh for generic errors, and (2) a broadband MZI+Crossing design for correlated errors. Because these designs allow for perfect realization of the cross state, the matrix fidelity no longer degrades with increased mesh size, allowing scaling to arbitrarily large meshes. The proposed architectures support progressive self-configuration, are more compact than previous MZI-doubling schemes, and do not require additional phase shifters. This removes a key limitation to the development of very-large-scale programmable photonic circuits.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34308-3

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