Low-Loss and Low-Power Silicon Ring Based WDM 32$\times$100 GHz Filter Enabled by a Novel Bend Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel TOPIC bend design for silicon ring resonators, enabling ultra-compact, low-loss, and low-power WDM filters with record-breaking parameters and potential for widespread application in integrated photonics.

Contribution

The paper presents the TOPIC bend, a new waveguide bend design that significantly improves silicon ring resonator performance and versatility, surpassing previous limits in size, power, and channel capacity.

Findings

Achieved the smallest silicon ring radius of 0.7 μm.

Developed a 32×100 GHz WDM filter with low insertion loss.

Reduced thermal tuning power to 5.85 mW/π.

Abstract

Ring resonators are crucial in silicon photonics for various applications, but conventional designs face performance trade-offs. Here a third-order polynomial interconnected circular (TOPIC) bend is proposed to revolutionize the ring designs fundamentally. The TOPIC bend has a unique feature of continuous curvature and curvature derivative, which is theoretically derived to be essential for waveguide loss optimization. With the TOPIC bend, the silicon ring resonators demonstrated here have achieved three records to the best of our knowledge: the smallest radius (0.7 $\mathrm{\mu m}$) for silicon rings resonating with single guided mode, the lowest thermal tuning power (5.85 mW/$\pi$) for silicon rings with FSR $\geq$3.2 THz, and the first silicon ring-based WDM 32$\times$100 GHz filter. The filter has doubled the channel amount compared to the state of the art, and meanwhile achieved low insertion loss (1.91 $\pm$ 0.28 dB) and low tuning power (283 GHz/mW). Moreover, the TOPIC bend is not limited to ring applications, it can also be used to create bends with an arbitrary angle, with the advantages of ultra-compact radius and heater integration, which are expected to replace all circular bends in integrated photonics, greatly reducing system size and power consumption.