Tunable silicon photonic wires fabricated by contact lithography and thermal oxidation

Low power optic switch using SOI-nanowires

“…To shrink the waveguides' cross-section and to smoothen the sidewalls even further, the waveguides were oxidized thermally. The nanowire fabrication process is explained in detail in [2]. For the following membrane fabrication processes, the wafers were diced and the processing was done for each chip.…”

“…The light is butt coupled into the nanowires by a lensed fibre. The measuring setup is explained in detail in Horn [2]. The propagation loss of the Mach-Zehnder-Interferometer is determined by the Fabry-Perot resonance method [11].…”

“…The observation of spontaneous Raman scattering at 1.54 μm from a Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) waveguide in 2002 [1] opened the option to use silicon even as an active optical amplifier. The high difference in refractive index of SOI allows the fabrication of low loss waveguides with small bending radii [2], [3] e.g. microresonators with a radius of only 2 μm [4].…”