Experimental demonstration of analog signal transmission in a silicon photonic crystal L3 resonator.

Abstract

We design and fabricate a silicon photonic crystal L3 resonator for chip-scale analog signal transmission. The lattice constant (a) is 420 nm, and the radius of holes (r) is 126 nm. The three holes adjacent to the cavity are laterally shifted by 0.175a, 0.025a and 0.175a, respectively. We experimentally evaluate the performance of silicon photonic crystal L3 resonator for chip-scale analog signal transmission. The spurious free dynamic ranges (SFDRs) of the second-order harmonic distortion (SHD) and the third-order harmonic distortion (THD), which are important factors to assess the analog link performance, are measured for the chip-scale analog signal transmission through the fabricated silicon photonic crystal L3 resonator. The SHD SFDR and THD SFDR are measured to be ~34.6 dB and ~52.2 dB even with the input optical carrier sitting at the dip resonance wavelength of the fabricated silicon photonic crystal L3 resonator. The influences of the optical carrier wavelength and input optical power on the SHD SFDR and THD SFDR are studied in the experiment. The impacts of geometric parameters of the cavity structure (lattice constant, radius of holes, shift of the hole) on the analog signal transmission are also analyzed, showing favorable analog link performance with relatively large fabrication tolerance to design parameters.