Five-Port Optical Router Design Based on Mach-Zehnder Switches for Photonic Networks-on-Chip

We design and simulate a five-port optical router, which is composed of twenty Mach-Zehnder-based switching elements and twelve waveguide crossings for use in integrated photonic interconnection networks. We simulated and analyzed the operation of the proposed optical router from the aspects of insertion loss,power budget, Q-factor and the minimum bit error ratio by use of OptiSystem simulator. The simulation results show that twenty possible input/output routing paths of the five-port optical router are verified at a data transmission rate of 20 Gbps for all input-output channels.