CMOS compatible athermal silicon microring resonators

TL;DR

This paper introduces CMOS-compatible, passively athermal silicon microring resonators that maintain stable operation over wide temperature ranges by tailoring optical mode confinement, addressing temperature sensitivity in silicon photonics.

Contribution

The work presents a novel, CMOS-compatible approach to passively achieve temperature stability in silicon microring resonators through optical mode confinement engineering.

Findings

Resonators operate over >80°C temperature range

Passive temperature compensation achieved without additional power

Method applicable to various photonic devices

Abstract

Silicon photonics promises to alleviate the bandwidth bottleneck of modern day computing systems. But silicon photonic devices have the fundamental problem of being highly sensitive to ambient temperature fluctuations due to the high thermo-optic (TO) coefficient of silicon. Most of the approaches proposed to date to overcome this problem either require significant power consumption or incorporate materials which are not CMOS-compatible. Here we demonstrate a new class of optical devices which are passively temperature compensated, based on tailoring the optical mode confinement in silicon waveguides. We demonstrate the operation of a silicon photonic resonator over very wide temperature range of greater than 80 degrees. The fundamental principle behind this work can be extended to other photonic structures such as modulators, routers, switches and filters.