Gradient-Based Power Efficient Functional Synthesis for Programmable Photonic Circuits

We propose an automatic approach for implementing light processing functions on programmable photonic integrated circuits. Our approach offers two unprecedented and significant advantages. Firstly, it is generalizable to any topology, including triangular, square, and hexagonal meshes, and any linear light processing function with a frequency domain representation. Secondly, it achieves power efficiency by minimizing power consumption, even when taking into account non-ideal thermal crosstalk. Our key is to employ a differentiable scattering matrix simulation and formulate functional synthesis as an L1-regularized optimization problem. Our proposed approach demonstrates superior power efficiency and synthesized result quality compared to several common baselines, with a slight and manageable increase in algorithm runtime.