Data Driven Programming of Photonic Integrated Circuits

Abstract: Programming photonic integrated hardware often reveals as a challenging task because of the presence of non-idealities in the photonic chip. These include fabrication imper- fections and parasitic effects such as thermal crosstalk, which cause unwanted coupling between control signals. Traditional control methods based on idealized models often fail to account for these phenomana, leading to significant discrepancies between the desired and actual circuit behaviour. In this work, we propose a data-driven approach for control- ling meshes of thermally tuneable Mach Zehnder interferometers (MZIs), which exploits a ML model trained to compensate for these non-idealities by pre- adjusting the electrical power given to integrated phase shifters. The proposed ML system is assessed using synthetic datasets and experimentally validated on a 3 x 3 triangular MZI mesh. Results demonstrate that the data-driven controller significantly improves program- ming accuracy, offering a robust solution for accurate programming of photonic integrated circuits.