ИСТИНА

Photonic information processing often demands programmable multiport interferometers capable ofimplementing arbitrary transfer matrices, for which planar meshes of tunable Mach-Zehnder interferom-eters (MZIs) are usually exploited [1], [2]. However, these MZI-based interferometers require balancedstatic beam-splitter (BSs) that make them sensitive to manufacturing errors. Here, we abandon theerror-sensitive MZI and propose an alternative design that uses a single static BS and a variable phaseshift as the building block of the interferometer mesh. Our BS-based design [3] (wich strongly utilizesthe ideas in [4]) has been shown to possess superior resilience to manufacturing errors, which is achievedwithout addition of extra elements into the schemes. Namely, the power transmissivities of the static BSsconstituent the interferometers can take arbitrary values in the range from≈1/2 to≈4/5.