Abstract
Programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are dense assemblies of tunable elements that provide flexible reconfigurability to enable different functions to be selected; however, due to manufacturing variations and thermal gradients that affect the optical phases of the elements, it is difficult to guarantee a stable correspondence between the electrical commands to the chip, and the function that it provides. Here we demonstrate a self-calibrating programmable PIC with full control over its complex impulse response, in the presence of thermal cross-talk between phase-tuning elements. Self-calibration is achieved by: (1) incorporating an optical reference path into the PIC; (2) using the Kramers–Kronig relationship to recover the phase response from amplitude measurements; and (3) applying a fast-converging self-calibration algorithm. We demonstrate dial-up signal processing functions with complex impulse responses using only 25 training iterations. This approach offers stable and accurate control of large-scale PICs, for demanding applications such as communications network reconfiguration, neuromorphic hardware accelerators and quantum computers.
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Data availability
The authors declare that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary Information.
Code availability
The authors declare that the algorithm supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary Information.
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Acknowledgements
We thank L. Zhuang, Y. Xie and S. Schoenhardt for the layout and tests of the FIR chip in prior projects. We thank B. Corcoran for the discussion of experiments. We thank A. Linzner for the fabrication of metal chip holders. We thank LioniX International, the Netherlands, for fabricating the FIR chip. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects Program (grant no. DP190101576, DP190102773).
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X.X., A.J.L. and A.B. conceived the idea and designed the project. X.X. performed the numerical simulations and experiments. G.R., A.B. and T.F. prepared experimental hardware. X.X., A.J.L., A.B., G.R., X.L. and A.M. contributed to the development of the experiment and to the data analysis. X.X. and A.J.L. wrote the manuscript with inputs from all other authors. A.J.L. and A.B. supervised the research.
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Xu, X., Ren, G., Feleppa, T. et al. Self-calibrating programmable photonic integrated circuits. Nat. Photon. 16, 595–602 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-01020-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-01020-z
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