Integrated multi-band WSS: from design to performance evaluation

Modern day optical communications require ever-increasing bandwidths and capacity, in order to keep up with the growth of traffic and resource-intensive applications. This increase in network capacity can be achieved through the use of the residual capacity of current-day infrastructure, although this requires switching and routing devices capable of wide-band operation in multiple transmission windows. In this work, we describe the design principle, architecture, and performance simulation of a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) based multi-band WSS, which is envisioned to operate on the S+C+L windows. While the architecture is scalable to an arbitrary channel and port count, we showcase a 24-channel implementation deployed on the 400ZR standard, providing both the penalty evaluation through DSP simulations, as well as a footprint evaluation based on the components design.