Optical-biased modulator employing a single silicon micro-ring resonator

Abstract We propose and experimentally demonstrate an optical-biased modulator employing a single silicon micro-ring resonator. By adjusting optical bias, the micro-ring modulator is capable of generating several modulation formats, namely, on–off keying, binary phase shift keying and reversed on–off keying, at the speed of 0.4 Gbit/s with extinction ratio higher than 5 dB. Compared to the previous reported bias control approaches, the optical bias proposed in this study is a novel mechanism, which can be easily conducted without complicated integrated structures or redundant electrical devices. Meanwhile, optical bias can also effectively protect the vulnerable integrated silicon devices from possible damage induced by high direct current voltage.

[1]  R. Soref,et al.  Electrooptical effects in silicon , 1987 .

[2]  Po Dong,et al.  High speed carrier-depletion modulators with 1.4V-cm V(pi)L integrated on 0.25microm silicon-on-insulator waveguides. , 2010, Optics express.

[3]  Jinzhong Yu,et al.  High-speed silicon modulator with band equalization. , 2014, Optics letters.

[4]  Jinzhong Yu,et al.  25 Gbit/s silicon microring modulator based on misalignment-tolerant interleaved PN junctions. , 2012, Optics express.

[5]  Oskar Painter,et al.  Self-induced optical modulation of the transmission through a high-Q silicon microdisk resonator. , 2006, Optics express.

[6]  F. Liu,et al.  Integrated silicon modulator based on microring array assisted MZI. , 2014, Optics express.

[7]  J. Cunningham,et al.  Thermally tunable silicon racetrack resonators with ultralow tuning power. , 2010, Optics express.

[8]  A. Biberman,et al.  An ultralow power athermal silicon modulator , 2014, Nature Communications.

[9]  J. Marti,et al.  High-speed modulation of a compact silicon ring resonator , 2009, 2009 6th IEEE International Conference on Group IV Photonics.

[10]  A. Knights,et al.  Silicon Photonics: An Introduction , 2004 .

[11]  Michal Lipson,et al.  Ultra-low power parametric frequency conversion in a silicon microring resonator. , 2008, Optics express.

[12]  Bo Zhang,et al.  Coupled-ring-resonator-based silicon modulator for enhanced performance. , 2008, Optics express.

[13]  Gyungock Kim,et al.  12.5 Gbps optical modulation of silicon racetrack resonator based on carrier-depletion in asymmetric p-n diode. , 2008, Optics express.

[14]  David J. Thomson,et al.  Silicon optical modulators , 2010 .

[15]  K. Vahala,et al.  Dynamical thermal behavior and thermal self-stability of microcavities , 2004, (CLEO). Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, 2005..

[16]  E. Bradley,et al.  Rapidly tunable narrowband wavelength filter using LiNbO/sub 3/ unbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometers , 1996 .

[17]  K. Yvind,et al.  Ultra-low-loss inverted taper coupler for silicon-on-insulator ridge waveguide , 2010 .