Robust Calibration and Energy Optimization in Reconfigurable Photonic Processors

Reconfigurable photonic processors suffer performance loss from fabrication tolerances, thermal drift, and other phase- and amplitude-error sources. We introduce an energy-aware calibration routine that simultaneously restores accuracy and minimizes heater power. After output-channel normalization, every Mach–Zehnder interferometer and external phase shifter is retuned by fitting measured transfer matrices to theory, halving the error in a 4x4 Hadamard-transform test. Three complementary optimizations—a global phase offset, selection of the lower-voltage branch for each SU(2) rotation, and permutation of matrix rows—substantially reduce total electrical power without degrading fidelity. This precision, power-conscious calibration removes a key obstacle to scalable, high-performance photonic computing systems.