Photoconductive Heaters Enable Control of Large-Scale Silicon Photonic Ring Resonator Circuits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable method for controlling large silicon photonic ring resonator circuits using doped waveguides that enable monitoring and tuning without extra components, facilitating practical large-scale photonic systems.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate a novel control approach using doped waveguides for large-scale silicon photonic circuits, enabling automatic resonance tuning without additional components or complex algorithms.

Findings

Controlled 31-ring switch with automatic resonance alignment

Controlled 14-ring coupled resonator waveguide

Achieved largest, most compact controlled silicon ring circuits to date

Abstract

A multitude of large-scale silicon photonic systems based on ring resonators have been envisioned for applications ranging from biomedical sensing to quantum computing and machine learning. Yet, due to the lack of a scalable solution for controlling ring resonators, practical demonstrations have been limited to systems with only a few rings. Here, we demonstrate that large systems can be controlled by using only doped waveguide elements inside their ringswhile preserving their area and cost. We measure the large photoconductive changes of the waveguides for monitoring the rings' resonance conditions across high-dynamic ranges and leverage their thermo-optic effects for tuning. This allows us to control ring resonators without requiring additional components, complex tuning algorithms, or additional electrical I/Os. We demonstrate automatic resonance alignment of 31 rings of a 16 x 16 switch and of a 14-ring coupled resonator optical waveguide, making them the largest, yet most compact, automatically controlled silicon ring resonator circuits to date, to the best of our knowledge.

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