Open Access
4 November 2022 Silicon photonic microelectromechanical systems add-drop ring resonator in a foundry process
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Abstract

Photonic add-drop filters are crucial components for the implementation of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) in fiber-optic communication systems. The recent progress in photonic integration has shown the potential to integrate photonic add-drop filters alongside high-performance photonic building blocks on a chip to construct compact and complex photonic-integrated circuits for WDM. Typically, implementations are based on micro-ring resonators with integrated heaters or free carrier dispersion-based modulators to adjust the filter wavelength. However, heaters suffer from high power consumption, and free carriers result in optical absorption losses, limiting the scalability toward very-large-scale circuits. We demonstrate the design, simulation, fabrication, and experimental characterization of a compact add-drop filter based on a vertically movable, MEMS-actuated ring resonator. The MEMS-actuated add-drop filter is implemented in IMEC’s iSiPP50G silicon photonics platform and realized using a short post-processing flow to safely release the suspended MEMS structures in a wafer-level compatible process. The filter exhibits a through port linewidth of ∼1 nm (124.37 GHz) at 1557.1 nm, and it retains a port extinction of 20 dB and a port isolation of >50 dB under 27 V of actuation voltage. The combination of low-power consumption and a compact footprint demonstrates the suitability for very-large-scale integration in photonic circuits.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
Hamed Sattari, Alain Yuji Takabayashi, Pierre Edinger, Peter Verheyen, Kristinn B. Gylfason, Wim Bogaerts, and Niels Quack "Silicon photonic microelectromechanical systems add-drop ring resonator in a foundry process," Journal of Optical Microsystems 2(4), 044001 (4 November 2022). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JOM.2.4.044001
Received: 20 July 2022; Accepted: 12 October 2022; Published: 4 November 2022
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CITATIONS
Cited by 3 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Resonators

Waveguides

Microelectromechanical systems

Microrings

Silicon photonics

Optical filters

Photonics

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