Abstract
Silicon photonics has gained interest for its potential to provide higher efficiency, bandwidth and reduced power consumption compared to electrical interconnects in datacenters and high performance computing environments. However, it is well known that silicon photonic devices suffer from temperature fluctuations due to silicon's high thermo-optic coefficient and therefore, temperature control in many applications is required. Here we present an athermal optical add-drop multiplexer fabricated from ring resonators. We used a sol-gel inorganic-organic hybrid material as an alternative to previously used materials such as polymers and titanium dioxide. In this work we studied the thermal curing parameters of the sol-gel and their effect on thermal wavelength shift of the rings. With this method, we were able to demonstrate a thermal shift down to -6.8 pm/°C for transverse electric (TE) polarization in ring resonators with waveguide widths of 325 nm when the sol-gel was cured at 130°C for 10.5 hours. We also achieved thermal shifts below 1 pm/°C for transverse magnetic (TM) polarization in the C band under different curing conditions. Curing time compared to curing temperature shows to be the most important factor to control sol-gel's thermo-optic value in order to obtain an athermal device in a wide temperature range.
Highlights
The emergence of social media, video streaming, online gaming, and lately the Internet of things, has led to a significant increase in demand for data transfer and file sharing
We demonstrate the first athermal multichannel optical add-drop multiplexer (OADM) device based on silicon microring resonators
We studied sol-gel curing conditions—time and temperature—in order to obtain athermal waveguides by modifying the thermo-optic coefficients
Summary
The emergence of social media, video streaming, online gaming, and lately the Internet of things, has led to a significant increase in demand for data transfer and file sharing. The transition to photonic devices would provide increased functionality, reliability, low cost and compact size, all of which are attractive for optical communications and bio-sensing, among other areas They support higher bandwidth, denser interconnects, with higher efficiency in addition to reduced cross talk, latency, and power consumption [3, 4]. In Si Photonic devices this can be done either by special MZI or microring assisted MZI designs [12,13,14,15,16], or through utilizing a hybrid material approach by incorporating negative thermo-optic coefficient (TOC) materials as cladding layers In the latter, the first athermal silica photonic devices were demonstrated using polymers in the O and C band [17,18,19]. These rings were ideally designed for TE, we obtained significant thermal shift reductions in TM which were less than 1 pm/°C from 5°C to 90°C
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