CIPS/OSA Brown Bag Seminar Series

Thursday, March 6, 2008

12 noon , RLE Haus Conf. Room 36-428

Thermal Tuning of Silicon Compatible Microring Filters

Reja Amatya

Microring resonators can be used as pass-band filters for

wavelength-division demultiplexing in electronic-photonic integrated

circuits for applications such as analog-to-digital converters.  For

high quality signal transmission, the resonant frequency of the filter

has to be held at a certain value to allow minimum timing errors in

the sampling of the signal.  Thermal tuning is used to compensate for

any fabrication errors or environmental temperature fluctuations that

might lead to shift in the resonant frequency. With an optimized

heater design, we demonstrate efficient on-chip thermal tuning for a

second-order silicon-rich silicon nitride microring resonator at 80

microW/GHz.  A closed loop feedback circuit controls a resistive

heater which is also used as a temperature sensor to maintain the

resonant frequency within 280 MHz of the absolute value.