The Study Of Several Applications Based On Tunable Silicon Microring Resonators

Silicon is a Group IV semiconductor element. Silicon material, which is widely used for the electronic and photonic device fabrication, acquired the dominance status in the modern electronic industry due to its physical and chemical properties. Since advantage of the CMOS compatible fabrication processes, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) is the most promising platform for integrated photonic devices.Microring resonator, which is formed by a single closed-loop waveguide, is a very clever resonance scheme. It is suit for lot kinds of optical applications, such as the lasers, the optical sensors, and the multiplexer/de-multiplexer. The information is produced by the differences, so the tunable character is the key character for the information function devices. Silicon has excellent thermo-optic and plasmonic dispersion effect:large range tuning could be achieved by the thermo-optic effect; tens of Gbit/s high speed modulation would be realized by the plasmonic dispersion effect. This paper focus on the silicon microring based devices. The reconfigurable optical link, integrated microring sensor and interrogator is demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally. This thesis makes innovative works mainly in the aspects as follows:1. A channel-selectable optical link based on silicon microring resonator is proposed and demonstrated. This optical link consists of the wavelength-tunable microring modulators and the filters, defined on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. With a p-i-n junction embedded in the microring modulator, light at the resonant wavelength of the ring resonator is modulated. And the2nd-order microring add-drop filter routes the modulated light. The channel selectivity is demonstrated by heating the microrings. With a thermal tuning efficiency of5.9mW/nm, the filter drop port response was successfully tuned with0.8nm channel spacing. We also show that modulation can be achieved in these channels. This device aims to offer flexibility and increase the bandwidth usage efficiency in optical interconnection. 2. The Fano resonance in the’eye-like’microring resonator system (EMRS) is theoretically and experimentally investigated. The asymmetric Fano-resonance line shape of EMRS is generated by adding a microring inside and coupling with the outer ring to produce a nonlinear phase shift. The EMRS was fabricated on silicon-on-insulator wafer by the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor compatible process. Compared to the conventional single-stage microring add-drop filter structure, the maximum sharpness of the transmission of the drop port is enhanced3times, and the drop port extinction ratio is increased by about20dB. The experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical analysis.3. A wavelength-modulated optical sensor interrogation system based on tunable microring filter has been proposed and demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally. The wavelength shift of the sensors can be readout from the shift of the peak optical output of the system by scanning the resonant wavelength of the microring filter. We fabricated the interrogator on the silicon-on-insulator platform and a fiber Bragg grating sensor was precisely interrogated. Such a technique potentially provides a compact, low-cost, and high-performance approach for the interrogation of the wavelength-modulated sensor and distributed sensor arrays.