Abstract

Athermal and flat-topped transmissions are the two main requirements for a silicon WDM filter. A Mach-Zehnder (MZ) filter which simultaneously satisfies these two requirements has been experimentally demonstrated in this paper. A combination of strip waveguide and hybrid strip-slot waveguide is introduced for athermalization, and two-stage interference is utilized for flat-topped transmission. The temperature dependent wavelength shift is measured to be ~-5 pm/K while the best 1 dB bandwidth is 5.5 nm with 14.7 nm free spectral range (FSR). The measured minimum insertion loss is only 0.4 dB with a device dimension of 170 μm × 580 μm. Moreover, Such a MZ filter is compatible with the state-of-art CMOS-fabrication process and its minimum feature size is as large as 200 nm.

Highlights

  • Silicon photonic wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is widely anticipated to solve the bandwidth bottleneck problem in nowadays high-performance computing systems [1,2]

  • One main requirement of a WDM filter is the flat-topped transmission pass-bands and almost all kinds of silicon WDM filters have been modified to satisfy this requirement, such as cascade for ring resonators [3,4,5,6], multimode interference (MMI) assisted aperture for Arrayed Waveguide Gratings (AWGs) [7,8,9,10], multi-stage interference for Mach-Zehnder (MZ) filters [11,12,13,14]

  • According to Eq (1), we find that the flat-top feature of Ch.1 can be maintained by modifying the coupling coefficients as Eq (2) for the case of a ≠ 1

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Summary

Introduction

Silicon photonic wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is widely anticipated to solve the bandwidth bottleneck problem in nowadays high-performance computing systems [1,2]. One main requirement of a WDM filter is the flat-topped transmission pass-bands and almost all kinds of silicon WDM filters have been modified to satisfy this requirement, such as cascade for ring resonators [3,4,5,6], multimode interference (MMI) assisted aperture for Arrayed Waveguide Gratings (AWGs) [7,8,9,10], multi-stage interference for Mach-Zehnder (MZ) filters [11,12,13,14] All of these methods are efficient in flatting the pass-bands. We have presented some preliminary results in the 13th International Conference on Group IV Photonics [26], while the complete simulation and measurement results are analyzed here

Flat-topped Mach-Zehnder filter
Athermalization with hybrid strip-slot waveguide
Conclusion

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