Switches are used to connect servers together to form a network in datacenters and in telecommunication. This can be done with electronic switches or optical switches. There has been a tremendous effort in the optics community to miniaturize switches with integrated photonic technology. Many of these switches are single wavelength switches, i.e they connect two ports with a single wavelength channel. These switches under utilize the channel bandwidth provided by Wavelength Division Multiplexing.

In this thesis, I propose a multi-wavelength selective switch that can dynamically assign multiple channels for any connection. Such a switch can help scale data centers and drastically reduce cabling complexity. The theory of the switch is developed and measurements of the switch fabricated in a Silicon photonics foundry are reported. A novel on-chip locking mechanism for the switches is also proposed and demonstrated.

We measured an average path loss of 10 dB on Gen III 8 × 4 switch with a standard deviation of 2 dB. These losses were reduced by a factor of 4 in Gen IV 4 × 4 switch with undoped ring resonators to 2.65 dB with a standard deviation of 1.35 dB. The tuning range of the rings is twice the Gen III 8 × 4 switch and the Gen IV 4 × 4 switch is tunable across 4 channels at 400 GHz spacing. We measured a 10 to 90 % large signal switching time of 15 s. Multiple input Bit Error Rate measurements showed negligible power penalty due to incoherent crosstalk. Ring resonators are also locked to two channels spaced at 100 and 200 GHz using an on-chip photodetector in an on-chip locking experiment.