Automatically setting arbitrary magnitude and phase of Mach-Zehnder interferometers for scalable optical computing

Abstract: This paper reports on an automated control strategy to set and stabilize a 2x2 integrated optical gate implemented with a balanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI). The control strategy reliably configures the gate in any desired working point without any prior calibration or complex algorithm for the correction of hardware non-idealities. It has been tested on a multistage silicon photonic chip comprising a coherent input vector generator, the 2x2 gate used as matrix-vector multiplier and a coherent receiver for phase measurement. By leveraging the presence of transparent photodiodes in key positions, precise control of light beams in any point of the circuit is obtained, which translates into a resolution in the computation of the matrix-vector product of 7.2 and 8.5 bits for the output power and phase, respectively. High accuracy, robustness against non-idealities and stability over long-term operation, ensured by the feedback-controlled architecture, provide scalability towards optical processors of any size. Additionally, the possibility of using the MZI both as computing gate and phase validation unit avoids propagation of programming errors, solving a significant issue of coherent optical computing architectures.