Thermal effect analysis of silicon microring optical switch for on-chip interconnect**Project supported by the Natural National Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61235001, 61575187, 61535002).

Abstract

The silicon microring resonator plays an important role in large-scale, high-integrability modern switching matrixes and optical networks, as silicon photonics enables ring resonators of an unprecedented compact size. But as the nature of resonators is their sensitivity to temperature, their performances are vulnerable to being affected by thermal effect. In this paper, we analyze the dominant thermal effects to the application of silicon microring optical switch. On the one hand we theoretically analyze and experimentally measure the thermal crosstalk among adjacent microring optical switches with different distances, and give possible solutions to minimize the affect of thermal crosstalk. On the other hand we analyze and measure the thermooptic dynamic response of microring switch; the experiment shows for the thermal-tuning that the rising edge is around 2 μs, and the falling edge is around 35 μs. We give the explanation of the asymmetric rise-time and fall-time.