Photonic integrated field-programmable disk array signal processor

TLDR

Field‑programmable gate arrays are essential for signal processing yet their speed and power are constrained by electronic clock rates and Ohmic losses. This study proposes photonics as an enabling solution to overcome these limitations by delivering ultrafast, low‑power processing. The authors design a scalable photonic field‑programmable disk array that uses ultra‑compact microdisk resonators as execution units to route, store, and process optical signals, enabling diverse circuit topologies for filtering, differentiation, delay, beamforming, and spectral shaping.

Abstract

Abstract Thanks to the nature of strong programmability, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been playing a significant role in signal processing and control. With the explosive growth in digital data, big data analytics becomes an important emerging field, in which FPGAs are a major player. However, the computational speed and power efficiency provided by FPGAs are limited by electronic clock rates and Ohmic losses. To overcome the limitations, photonics is envisioned as an enabling solution, thanks to its ultrafast and low power consumption feature. In this paper, we propose a scalable photonic field-programmable disk array (FPDA) signal processor. Ultra-compact microdisk resonators are leveraged as a fundamental execution units in the core to route, store and process optical signals. By field-programming the processor, diverse circuit topologies can be realized to perform multiple specific signal processing functions including filtering, temporal differentiation, time delay, beamforming, and spectral shaping.