A Comprehensive Electro-Optical Model for Silicon Photonic Switches

Abstract

Optical networks are revolutionizing computing systems by improving the energy efficiency, bandwidth, and latency of data movements. Silicon photonic switches, such as microresonator and Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI), are the basic building blocks of optical networks. This work proposes a SPICE-compatible electro-optical co-simulation model, BOSIM, to systematically study silicon photonic \linebreak switches using PN, PIN, and MIS capacitor device technologies. BOSIM holistically models both transient and steady-state properties such as switching speed, power, transmission spectrum, area and carrier distribution. BOSIM is validated by the measured data from eight research groups and companies. Compared to microresonator, BOSIM shows that MZI can provide 1.24X performance for a 128-core multiprocessor using photonic network-on-chip but cost 2.20X energy and 7.3X area.