Integrated electronic controller for dynamic self-configuration of photonic circuits

Emanuele Sacchi; Francesco Zanetto; Andres Ivan Martinez; SeyedMohammad SeyedinNavadeh; Francesco Morichetti; Andrea Melloni; Marco Sampietro; Giorgio Ferrari

doi:10.1038/s41377-025-01977-w

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Integrated electronic controller for dynamic self-configuration of photonic circuits

Original Articles

- Integrated electronic controller for dynamic self-configuration of photonic circuits
- Light: Science & Applications Vol. 14, Issue 11, Pages: 3715-3725(2025)
- Affiliations：
  
  1.Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, Milano 20133, Italy
  2.Department of Physics, Politecnico di Milano, piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, Milano 20133, Italy
- Author bio：
  
  Emanuele Sacchi (emanuele.sacchi@polimi.it)
- Funds：
- DOI：10.1038/s41377-025-01977-w
  CLC：
- Received：22 January 2025，
  
  Revised：2025-07-03，
  
  Accepted：22 July 2025，
  
  Published Online：30 September 2025，
  
  Published：30 November 2025
- Accepted：
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Sacchi, E. et al. Integrated electronic controller for dynamic self-configuration of photonic circuits. Light: Science & Applications, 14, 3715-3725 (2025).
DOI：

Sacchi, E. et al. Integrated electronic controller for dynamic self-configuration of photonic circuits. Light: Science & Applications, 14, 3715-3725 (2025). DOI： 10.1038/s41377-025-01977-w.

摘要

Abstract

Reconfigurable photonic integrated circuits (PICs) can implement arbitrary operations and signal processing functionalities directly in the optical domain. Run-time configuration of these circuits requires an electronic control layer to adjust the working point of their building elements and compensate for thermal drifts or degradations of the input signal. As the advancement of photonic foundries enables the fabrication of chips of increasing complexity

developing scalable electronic controllers becomes crucial for the operation of complex PICs. In this paper

we present an electronic application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed for reconfiguration of PICs featuring numerous tunable elements. Each channel of the ASIC controller independently addresses one optical component of the PIC

and multiple parallel local feedback loops are operated to achieve full control. The proposed design is validated through real-time reconfiguration of a 16-channel silicon photonics adaptive universal beam coupler. Results demonstrate automatic coupling of an arbitrary input beam to a single-mode waveguide

dynamic compensation of beam wavefront distortions and successful transmission of a 50 Gbit/s signal through an optical free-space link. The low power consumption and compactness of the electronic chip provide a scalable paradigm that can be seamlessly extended to larger photonic architectures.

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references

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