ABSTRACT
Photonic wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) weight banks are the core device associated with networking in broadcast-and-weight systems. Photonic weight bank device performance is therefore closely tied to broadcast-and-weight system bandwidth, scalability, and reconfigurability. Microring resonators (MRR) are a good candidate to implement photonic weight banks on-chip because of their compactness, ubiquity, and ease of tuning. Radio frequency photonic circuits based on matched filtering also always require some way to effect negative weights for matched filtering. The drop and through outputs of the MRR weight bank are amplified, their net delays matched and detected by a balanced photodiode. Coherent interactions between filters for different channels are a novel physical effect in a WDM system context, which factors into the design and analysis of weight banks. The chapter describes techniques for building efficient simulations of tunable generalized waveguide circuits, particularly MRR weight banks.
