Lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) is a new photonic integrated platform that provides high optical confinement and retains the inherent excellent properties of lithium niobate (LN). Tunable filters are one of the indispensable devices for integrated optics. Here we design and fabricate a thermo-optic (TO) tunable optical filter using two cascaded racetrack microring resonators (MRRs) based on LNOI. The filter shows a narrow and flat top passband with intra band ripple less than 0.3 dB, 3 dB bandwidth of 4.8 GHz and out-of-band rejection of about 35 dB. The insertion loss of the filter is about −14 dB, including grating coupling loss about −6.5 dB and on-chip loss less than −1 dB. The heating power for center wavelength shift of the filter is about 89.4 mW per free spectral range (FSR). Relevant applications of such filters include optical information processing and microwave photonics.

Lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) is rising as one of the most promising platforms for integrated photonics due to the high-index-contrast and excellent material properties of lithium niobate, such as wideband transparency from visible to mid-infrared, large electro-optic, piezoelectric, and second-order harmonic coefficients. The fast-developing micro- and nano-structuring techniques on LNOI have enabled various structure, devices, systems, and applications. In this contribution, we review the latest developments in this platform, including ultra-high speed electro-optic modulators, optical frequency combs, opto-electro-mechanical system on chip, second-harmonic generation in periodically poled LN waveguides, and efficient edge coupling for LNOI.

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We demonstrate GHz-bandwidth optical filters using cascaded lithium niobate (LN) microring resonators (MRRs). The inserted loss is 0.84 dB and the extinction ratio is about 35 dB. They can find relevant application in microwave photonics.