Experimental demonstration of a 24-port packaged multi-microring network-on-chip in silicon photonic platform

A 24-port packaged multi-microring optical network-on-chip has been tested for simultaneous co- and counter-propagating transmissions at the same wavelength at 10 Gbps. In the co-propagating scenario communications up to five hops with one interfering signal have been tested, together with transmissions impaired by up to three interfering signals. In the counterpropagating scenario the device performance has been investigated exploiting the ring resonators in both shared-source and shared-destination configurations. The spectral characterization is in good agreement with the theoretical results. Bit-error-rate measurements indicate power penalties at BER=10-9limited to (i) 0.5 dB in the co-propagating scenarios independently from the number of interfering transmissions, (ii) 0.8 dB in the counter-propagating scenario with shared-source configuration, and (iii) 2 dB in the counter-propagating scenario with shareddestination configuration.