Photonic Systems Brown Bag Seminar Series

Thursday, March 8, 2007

12 noon , RLE Haus Conf. Room 36-428

"Taming strong-confinement photonics and building high-performance microring resonator filters"

Milos Popovic

The idea to use dielectric microring resonators for planar integrated-optical filters stems from the late 1960's when integrated optics was born, but it has taken 30 years for fabrication technology to advance to a level where practical devices can be considered. To achieve the kind of wide free-spectral range (FSR) that is required for microring filters to be useful as channel add/drop filters in telecom applications, we have turned to very high refractive index contrast (HIC) between the waveguide core and cladding materials. HIC brings new challenges in both electromagnetic design and device fabrication.

In this seminar, we will describe design and fabrication considerations for IC microrings and coupled microring filters.  This will include device simulation and design of SiN and silicon photonic circuits, effects of coupling-induced frequency shifting and loss, multistage filter arrangements, polarization-transparent photonic circuits, and hitless tuning, switching and resonance suppression for multiplication of the free spectral range. Device results of low-loss filters with flat-top passbands, deep through-port extinction, a wide FSR and polarization transparency will be reported.