Stability of polymer-dielectric bi-layers for athermal silicon photonics.

Temperature sensitivity of Si based rings can be nullified by the use of polymer over-cladding. Integration of athermal passive rings in an electronic-photonic architecture requires the possibility of multi-layer depositions with patterned structures. This requires establishing UV, thermal and plasma stability of the polymer during multi-layer stacking.

Athermal operation of silicon waveguides: spectral, second order and footprint dependencies.

We report the design criteria and performance of Si ring resonators for passive athermal applications in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). The waveguide design rules address i) positive-negative thermo-optic (TO) composite structures, ii) resonant wavelength dependent geometry to achieve constant confinement factor (Gamma), and iii) observation of small residual second order effects. We develop exact design requirements for a temperature dependent resonant wavelength shift (TDWS) of 0 pm/K and present prototype TDWS performance of 0.

Magneto-optical nonreciprocal phase shift in garnet/silicon-on-insulator waveguides.

We demonstrate the integration of a single-crystal magneto-optical film onto thin silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguides by use of direct wafer bonding. Simulations show that the high confinement and asymmetric structure of SOI allows an enhancement of approximately 3x over the nonreciprocal phase shift achieved in previous designs; this value is confirmed by our measurements. Our structure will allow compact magneto-optical nonreciprocal devices, such as isolators, integrated on a silicon waveguiding platform.