Silicon photonic microelectromechanical systems add-drop ring resonator in a foundry process

Abstract

Abstract. Photonic add-drop filters are crucial components for the implementation of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) in fiber-optic communication systems. The recent progress in photonic integration has shown the potential to integrate photonic add-drop filters alongside high-performance photonic building blocks on a chip to construct compact and complex photonic-integrated circuits for WDM. Typically, implementations are based on micro-ring resonators with integrated heaters or free carrier dispersion-based modulators to adjust the filter wavelength. However, heaters suffer from high power consumption, and free carriers result in optical absorption losses, limiting the scalability toward very-large-scale circuits. We demonstrate the design, simulation, fabrication, and experimental characterization of a compact add-drop filter based on a vertically movable, MEMS-actuated ring resonator. The MEMS-actuated add-drop filter is implemented in IMEC’s iSiPP50G silicon photonics platform and realized using a short post-processing flow to safely release the suspended MEMS structures in a wafer-level compatible process. The filter exhibits a through port linewidth of ∼1  nm (124.37 GHz) at 1557.1 nm, and it retains a port extinction of 20 dB and a port isolation of >50  dB under 27 V of actuation voltage. The combination of low-power consumption and a compact footprint demonstrates the suitability for very-large-scale integration in photonic circuits.