  Due to the growing popularity of optical superchannels and software defined
networking, reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) architectures
for superchannel switching have recently attracted significant attention.
ROADMs based on micro electro-mechanical system (MEMS) and liquid
crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) technologies are predominantly used. Motivated by
requirements for low power, high-speed, small area footprint and compact
switching solutions, we propose and demonstrate spatial and wavelength flexible
superchannel switching using monolithically integrated silicon photonics (SiP)
micro-ring resonators (MRR). We demonstrate the MRRs capabilities and potential
to be used as a fundamental building block in ROADMs. Unicast and multicast
switching operation of an entire superchannel is demonstrated after
transmission over 50 km of standard single mode fiber. The performance of each
sub-channel from the 120 Gb/s QPSK Nyquist superchannel is analyzed and
degradation in error vector magnitude performance was observed for outer
sub-channels due to the 3-dB bandwidth of the MRRs, which is comparable with
the superchannel bandwidth. However, all sub-channels for all switching cases
(unicast, multicast and bi-directional operation) exhibit performance far below
the 7% FEC limit. The switching time of the SiP MRR chip is such that high
capacity superchannel interconnects between users can be setup and reconfigured
on the microsecond timescale.
