Athermal Operation of Silicon Waveguides: Spectral, Second Order and Footprint Dependencies

• Main Authors: Raghunathan, Vivek (Contributor), Ye, Winnie N. (Author), Hu, Juejun (Contributor), Izuhara, Tomoyuki (Author), Michel, Jurgen (Contributor), Kimerling, Lionel C. (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Materials Processing Center (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Microphotonics Center (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Optical Society of America, 2010-09-02T14:28:56Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

We report the design criteria and performance of Si ring resonators for passive athermal applications in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). The waveguide design rules address i) positivenegative thermo-optic (TO) composite structures, ii) resonant wavelength dependent geometry to achieve constant confinement factor ( Γ ), and iii) observation of small residual second order effects. We develop exact design requirements for a temperature dependent resonant wavelength shift (TDWS) of 0 pm/K and present prototype TDWS performance of 0.5pm/K. We evaluate the materials selection tradeoffs between high-index contrast (HIC) and low-index contrast (LIC) systems and show, remarkably, that FSR and footprint become comparable under the constraint of athermal design.
United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency . Athermal Photonic Circuits program