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Abstract Phase‐sensitive integrated photonic devices are highly susceptible to minor manufacturing deviations, resulting in significant performance inconsistencies. This variability has limited the scalability and widespread adoption of these devices. Here, a major advancement is achieved through continuous‐wave (CW) visible light (405 and 520 nm) trimming of plasma‐enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) silicon‐rich nitride (SRN) waveguides. The demonstrated method achieves precise, bidirectional refractive index tuning with a single laser source in CMOS‐compatible SRN samples with refractive indices of 2.4 and 2.9 (measured at 1550 nm). By utilizing a cost‐effective setup for real‐time resonance tracking in micro‐ring resonators, the resonant wavelength shifts as fine as 10 pm are attained. Additionally, a record red shift of 49.1 nm and a substantial blue shift of 10.6 nm are demonstrated, corresponding to refractive index changes of approximately 0.11 and −2 × 10⁻². The blue and red shifts are both conclusively attributed to thermal annealing. These results highlight SRN's exceptional capability for permanent optical tuning, establishing a foundation for stable, precisely controlled performance in phase‐sensitive integrated photonic devices. 

The modal dispersion of waveguides typically limits integrated photonic devices to operation with a single polarization state. In this work, we propose a generic mode separation technique we call “interferometric mode splitting” (IMS), which enables guided modes to be separated over wide bandwidths with a large extinction ratio. To demonstrate the general principle of IMS, we show that an unmodified thermally driven silicon photonic Fourier transform spectrometer exhibits a polarization-separating effect in the frequency domain, even though only one polarization-insensitive detector is used. Using this effect, we experimentally demonstrate a simple on-chip spectrometer capable of extracting two-polarization spectra over a wide 1480–1630 nm bandwidth with a greater than 20 dB polarization extinction ratio. These specifications would be highly challenging to achieve using existing, conventional on-chip polarization-splitting techniques. Though we focus on this specific realization of IMS, we also show that IMS is general to various on-chip spectrometer architectures, other spatial modes, and technologies other than thermally driven Fourier transform spectrometers. Interferometric mode splitting shows promise as a general approach for robust and fundamentally broadband detection of orthogonal modes in guided-wave sensing. 

Physical reservoir computing (PRC) is a recently developed variant of neuromorphic computing, where the output from a nonlinear physical system is utilized to perform various machine learning tasks. In this work, we theoretically analyze the performance of a photonic waveguide mesh (WGM) with electro-optic phase shifters for monolithic-hybrid-photonic-electronic reservoir computing (MHPE RC), where the phase-to-intensity relations in the photonic circuit provide nonlinearity and high dimensionality, while the electronic circuit provides the input and feedback with tunable parameters. First, we numerically demonstrate the efficiency and performance superiority of a parallel architecture comprising fabricated WGM. Next, we present the Lyapunov filtered-minimal redundancy maximal relevance (Lf-mRMR) algorithm, which optimizes the electronic parameters of parallel WGMs by analyzing the Lyapunov exponent and the mutual information between the output of the corresponding WGMs and the required task. The Lf-mRMR algorithm is computationally less complex, substantially improves the performance of MHPE RC, and can tolerate fabrication errors. We present the selective parallel architecture for reservoir computing (SPARC), which, assisted by the Lf-mRMR algorithm, can achieve performance close to convolutional neural networks. Finally, we experimentally employ on-chip silicon photonics with thermo-optical phase shifters and external off-chip digital memory and control unit to validate the advantageous performance of Lf-mRMR-assisted RC. 

Chalcogenide phase-change materials exhibit large, reversible index shifts that promise nonvolatile, energy-efficient photonic technologies. Yet, current implementations either rely on ultrathin, lossy films integrated with passive Si/SiN waveguides, limiting index modulation, or exploit direct laser writing for localized switching, at the expense of strong optical confinement. Here we demonstrate an antimony trisulfide (Sb₂S₃) waveguide platform where the material itself forms the guiding core. The proposed architecture theoretically supports substantial modulation of both effective index and absorption, thereby providing a robust platform for the realization of reconfigurable and densely integrated photonic devices. 

Polarization control and switchability are among the most unique features of “metasurfaces” as compared with diffractive optics technologies of the past. Here, we review how the polarization control afforded by the advent of present‐day metasurfaces compares to diffractive elements of previous decades, clarifying from a functional perspective what is new, and what is not. 

Panel-scale reconfigurable photonic interconnects on a glass substrate up to 500-mm × 500-mm or larger are envisioned by proposing a novel photonic switch fabric that enables all directional panel-edge-to-panel-edge reach without active repeaters while offering high communication bandwidth, planar-direction reconfigurability, low energy consumption, and compelling data bandwidth density for heterogeneous integration of an in-package artificial intelligence computing system on a photonic interposer exceeding thousands of centimeters square. The proposed approach focuses on reconfigurable photonic interconnects, which are integration-compatible with commercial processor chiplets and 3-D high-bandwidth memory stacks, to create a novel panel-scale heterogeneously integrated package enabled by high-capacity wavelength-division-multiplexing optical data links using advanced optical modulators, broadband photodetectors, novel optical crossbar switches with multilayer waveguides, and on-chip frequency comb sources. 

An energy/area-efficient low-cost broadband linearity enhancement technique using the hybrid of notch-filter and bandpass-filter micro-ring modulators (Hybrid-MRMs) is proposed to achieve higher than 3.01-dB improvement in spurious-free-dynamic-ranges with intermodulation distortions (dSFDRIMD) and 17.9-dB improvement in integral nonlinearity (dINLPP) over a conventional notch-filter MRM (NF-MRM) across a 4.8-dB extinction-ratio full-scale range based on rapid silicon-photonics fabrication results for the emerging applications of various analog and digital optical communication systems. 

Free carrier absorption (FCA) is established to be the cause of nonlinear losses in plasma‐enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) silicon‐rich nitride (SRN) waveguides. To validate this hypothesis, a photo‐induced current is measured in SRN thin films with refractive indices varying between 2.5 and 3.15 when a C‐band laser light is illuminating the SRN films at various powers, indicating the generation of free carriers. Furthermore, nonlinear loss dynamics is, for the first time, measured and characterized in detail in SRN waveguides by utilizing high peak power C‐band complex shape optical pulses for estimation of free carrier generation (FCG) and free carrier recombination (FCR) lifetimes and their dynamics. Both FCG and FCR are found to decrease with an increase in the refractive index of SRN, and, specifically, the FCR lifetimes are found (92 ± 7) ns, (39 ± 3) ns, and (31 ± 2) ns for the SRN indices of 2.7, 3, and 3.15, respectively. Lastly, nonlinear losses in high refractive index SRN waveguides are demonstrated to be minimized and altogether avoided when the pulse duration reduced below the free carrier generation lifetime, thus providing a way of taking a full advantage of the large inherent SRN nonlinear properties. 

Silicon nitride is widely used in integrated photonics for optical nonlinear wave mixing due to its low optical losses combined with relatively high nonlinear optical properties and a wide‐range transparency window. It is known that a higher concentration of Si in silicon‐rich nitride (SRN) magnifies both the nonlinear response and optical losses, including nonlinear losses. To address the trade‐off, four‐wave mixing (FWM) is implemented in over a hundred SRN waveguides prepared by plasma‐enhanced chemical vapor deposition in a wide range of SRN refractive indices varying between 2.5 and 3.2 (measured in the C‐band). It is determined that SRN with a refractive index of about 3 maximizes the FWM efficiency for continuous‐wave operation, indicating that the refractive index of SRN is indeed a crucial optimization parameter for nonlinear optics applications. The FWM efficiency is limited by large nonlinear optical losses observed in SRN waveguides with indices larger than 2.7, which are not related to two‐photon absorption. Finally, the third‐order susceptibility and the nonlinear refractive index are estimated for multiple SRN refractive indices, and, specifically, the nonlinearities as large as and are estimated in a waveguide with an SRN refractive index of 3.2. 

This paper adopts advanced monolithic silicon-photonics integrated-circuits manufacturing capabilities to realize system-on-chip photonic-electronic linear-algebra accelerators for self-attention computation in various applications of deep-learning neural networks and Large Language Models. With the features of holistic co-design approaches, optical comb-based broadband modulations, and consecutive matrix-multiplication architecture, the system/circuit/device-level simulations of the proposed accelerator can achieve 2.14-TMAC/s/mm2 computation density and 27.9-fJ/MAC energy efficiency with practical considerations of power/area overhead due to photonic-electronic on-chip conversions, integrations, and calibrations.