Thermo-optical enhanced silicon wire interleavers

Abstract

Ring-resonator (RR) and ring-assisted (RA) Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) interleaver structures with thermo-optical fine tuning are proposed and fabricated on silicon-on-insulator. With thermo-optical fine tuning, the crosstalks are improved from ∼12 to ∼22 dB and from ∼6 to ∼17 dB for RR- and RA-MZI interleavers, respectively. In a wavelength range of 40 nm, the RR-MZI interleaver structure has more uniform responses whereas the RA-MZI interleaver structure has sharper rolloffs. © 2008 IEEE.