Performance Investigation of Photonic Crystal-Based Microring Resonator for Optical Signal Processing

Abstract

A detailed theoretical analysis is presented to characterize wave propagation at 1,550 nm inside a glass (SiO2) microring resonator implemented using photonic crystal technology. A photonic crystal reflection is used at each microring resonator corner to enhance the bending efficiency. The characteristics of both photonic crystal beam splitter and microring resonator bending losses are analyzed and investigated using both effective refractive index and finite difference time domain methods. Analytical expressions are also derived to describe the field enhancement inside the microring resonator, the transfer function of the microring resonator, and the main parameters characterizing the resonator such as resonator band width and quality factor. The analysis is also extended to characterize a drop filter implemented using photonic crystal-based microring resonator. The results indicate clearly that the effective refractive index method can give accurate results if one starts the calculations with finite difference time domain-estimated beam splitter parameters. Further, bending efficiency as high as 99% can be obtained using a ten-post layer photonic crystal mirror at each microring resonator corner.