Design of photonic crystal based optical digital to analog converters

Abstract The future of telecommunication and optical communication networks is extremely focused on the design and development of photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Photonic crystals play the foremost role in realizing all optical integrated circuits. Every single optical component required to be integrated in PICs can be outlined based on the requirement of the application and can be obtained with the photonic band gap property of photonic crystals. Numerous works on different optical components has been done using photonic crystals. Among which, optical digital-to-analog converters (DACs) need to be explored and attended to incorporate into PICs. In this paper, photonic crystal-based 1-bit and 2-bit DACs, suitable for the photonic integrated circuits application, are proposed. Photonic crystal ring resonators and waveguides were integrated into the reported structures. The Kerr effect of the ring resonators has been utilized to provide an average error of 4.8477% for a 2-bit optical DAC. The devised structure provides an insertion loss of  −5.5596 dB, with an overall dimension of 358 µ m 2 . The DAC structures were simulated using finite difference time domain and plane wave expansion methods.