Abstract
An ultracompact widely tunable thermooptical (TO) microring resonator
(MRR) filter based on Si nanowires is presented. The Si nanowire waveguide
has a SiO<sub>2</sub> insulator,
Si core, a SiO<sub>2</sub> up-cladding,
and a thin metal film at the top. The metal circuit along the microring is
used as a submicrometer heater which has the same width as the Si nanowire
waveguide. The up-cladding is optimized to reduce the light absorption of
the metal as well as to have a good heat-conduction from the heater to the
Si core. Two pads used as the contact points for the probes connecting to
the electrical power are perpendicularly connected to the microring by using
optimized T-junctions (with a low excess loss of about 0.06
dB per T-junction). With such a design, the present thermally
tunable microring resonator (MRR) can be fabricated by using a standard fabrication
process with a single lithography process, which is much simpler than the
fabrication with double lithography processes used for the conventional TO
components. Finally, the simulation results show that the designed MRR has
a wide tuning range of about 20 nm with a low heating power of 5 mW.
© 2008 IEEE
PDF Article
More Like This
Cited By
You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an Optica member, or as an authorized user of your institution.
Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access Optica Member Subscription