Large-scale integration of wavelength-addressable all-optical memories on a photonic crystal chip

• Published in: Nature photonics Vol. 8; no. 6; pp. 474 - 481
• Main Authors: Kuramochi, Eiichi, Nozaki, Kengo, Shinya, Akihiko, Takeda, Koji, Sato, Tomonari, Matsuo, Shinji, Taniyama, Hideaki, Sumikura, Hisashi, Notomi, Masaya
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01-06-2014; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 140/125; 142/126; 147/135; 639/624/399/1022; 639/624/399/1098; Applied and Technical Physics; Chips; Density; Devices; Electronics; Nanostructure; Optical memory (data storage); Photonic crystals; Photonics; Physics; Quantum Physics
• ISSN: 1749-4885; 1749-4893
• DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2014.93

Photonic integration has long been pursued, but remains immature compared with electronics. Nanophotonics is expected to change this situation. However, despite the recent success of nanophotonic devices, there has been no demonstration of large-scale integration. Here, we describe the large-scale and dense integration of optical memories in a photonic crystal chip. To achieve this, we introduce a wavelength-addressable serial integration scheme using a simple cavity-optimization rule. We fully exploit the wavelength-division-multiplexing capability, which is the most important advantage of photonics over electronics, and achieve an extremely large wavelength-channel density. This is the first demonstration of the large-scale photonic integration of nanophotonic devices coupled to waveguides in a single chip, and also the first dense wavelength-division-multiplexing nanophotonic devices other than filters. This work paves the way for optical random-access memories and for a large-scale wavelength-division-multiplexing photonic network-on-chip.
Large-scale densely integrated optical memory on a single photonic crystal chip is demonstrated. The wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) capabilities of nanophotonic memories are exploited for optical addressing. This work may enable optical random-access memories and a large-scale WDM photonic network-on-chip.