Silicon Programmable Photonic Circuits Based on Periodic Bimodal Waveguides

[EN] This study proposes an alternative tunable unit to address some of the most challenging limitations in programmable photonics: large-scale integration and space utilization. It demonstrates the use of periodic bimodal waveguides in the core of the programmable photonic circuit for optical matrix multiplication, with a resulting footprint that vastly outperforms conventional MZI-based approaches by more than two-orders of magnitude.image