Athermal and wavelength-trimmable photonic filters based on TiO2-cladded amorphous-SOI

Large-scale integrated silicon photonic circuits suffer from two inevitable issues that boost the overall power consumption. First, fabrication imperfections even on sub-nm scale result in spectral device non-uniformity that require fine-tuning during device operation. Second, the photonic devices need to be actively corrected to compensate thermal drifts. As a result significant amount of power is wasted if no athermal and wavelength-trimmable solutions are utilized. Consequently, in order to minimize the total power requirement of photonic circuits in a passive way, trimming methods are required to correct the device inhomogeneities from manufacturing and athermal solutions are essential to oppose temperature fluctuations of the passive/active components during run-time. We present an approach to fabricate CMOS backend-compatible and athermal passive photonic filters that can be corrected for fabrication inhomogeneities by UV-trimming based on low-loss amorphous-SOI waveguides with TiO cladding. The trimming of highly confined 10 μm ring resonators is proven over a free spectral range retaining athermal operation. The athermal functionality of 2nd-order 5 μm add/drop microrings is demonstrated over 40.C covering a broad wavelength interval of 60 nm. 2

DDC Class

600: Technik

Funding(s)

Open Access Publizieren 2013 - 2015 / Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg

Funding Organisations

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

More Funding Information

The authors like to thank DFG grant FOR-653 for partial funding of the fabrication expenses.

Options

Athermal and wavelength-trimmable photonic filters based on TiO2-cladded amorphous-SOI