Reconfigurable photonic integrated circuits on silicon

The development of smart photonic networks has been developing for a long time in order to utilize the bandwidth/channels optimally and flexibly. As the link capacity increases dramatically by introducing advanced multiplexing technologies, the development of smart photonic networks is even becoming more important and more complicated. The key for the realization of smart photonic networks is reconfigurable photonic integrated devices and circuits. As silicon photonics has been developed as an excellent platform for PICs in the past years, in this paper we gives a review of our recent work on reconfigurable photonic integrated devices and circuits on silicon for wavelengthdivision-multiplexing (WDM), mode-division-multiplexing (MDM), as well as hybrid WDM-MDM systems. It includes (1) 2×2 optical switches, and (2) monolithically-integrated reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs).