Integrated thermal stabilization of a microring modulator

Abstract

A defect-enhanced silicon photodiode and heater are integrated with and used to thermally stabilize a microring modulator. These optoelectronic components are interfaced with external control circuitry to create a closed-looped feedback system for thermally stabilizing the microring modulator. The thermal stabilization system enables the microring modulator to provide error-free 5-Gb/s modulation while being subjected to thermal fluctuations that would normally render it inoperable.

Wavelength Locking of Microring Resonators and Modulators using a Dithering Signal

“…Our prior results 3,5 demonstrate that this system will also thermally stabilize the microring resonator/modulator. The demonstrated system is immune to optical power fluctuations, and the slow-speed analog and digital electronics comprising our implemented system have the potential to be directly integrated with the photonic components, providing a smallfootprint, energy-efficient, WDM scalable method of wavelength locking and thermally stabilizing microring resonator based devices in their use in next-generation optical links.…”

“…There have been several attempted solutions for wavelength locking and thermally stabilizing microring resonators [2][3][4] . However, no current demonstrated system has satisfied all required criteria, that is, a system that is lowcost and energy-efficient, does not require additional photonic structures, is compatible with WDM implementation, immune to fluctuations in the optical power, and implementable for either passive microring resonators or active components such as microring modulators.…”

Ar+-Implanted Si-Waveguide Photodiodes for Mid-Infrared Detection

“…Further, when the bias voltage was reduced to 0 V, these devices had 41% of the measured photocurrent compared to that obtained at a bias of 5 V, while the dark current dropped to less than 11 pA, resulting in over a six order of magnitude difference between the photo-and the dark current. With such low dark currents and high responsivities, these detector circuits are ideal for use in applications such as ring resonator stabilization [26]. …”

A Micro-Processor-Based Feedback Stabilization Scheme for High-Q, Non-Linear Silicon Resonators

“…There have been a number of demonstrations of cavity stabilization in silicon photonic devices using both electrical [14] and thermal [15] elements on-chip. These schemes have been primarily designed for tracking of the cavity line in linear optical applications such as data communications.…”