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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Nonlinear effects in ultrasmall silicon-on-insulator ring resonators

Gino Priem, Pieter Dumon, Wim Bogaerts, Dries Van Thourhout, Geert I. Morthier, Roel Baets

Published Apr 21, 2006• 3 citations

Abstract

We investigate the significance of secondary effects caused by free carrier accumulation and subsequent heating on the nonlinear behaviour of ultrasmall Silicon-On-Insulator ring resonators. All-optical bistability based on thermal dispersion was experimentally obtained for an input power of only 0.28mW. At higher powers, pulsating behaviour was observed which is problematic for the stability of thermal memory and switching operations. Using free carrier dispersion, we also demonstrate all-optical wavelength conversion with a pulse length of 10 ns, indicating that bitrates of 0.1 Gb/s are feasible. Also here, the presence of unstable pulsations was observed, leading to significant errors in the converted data pattern.

DOI: 10.1117/12.668249

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Q

silicon microring resonators (MRRs) induced by thermo-optical (TO) effect and other nonlinear effects are theoretically studied with coupled mode theory and linear stability analysis method. It is found that the boundaries for both BI and SP are mainly restricted by two counteracting effects: free carrier dispersion effect and TO effect. If the refractive index changes of a MRR caused by these two effects are on the same order of magnitude, the output power will exhibit much more complicated dependence on the input power and wavelength, namely, input-power-dependent multi-BI and multi-SP regions will exist at certain input wavelength range. The controllability of multi-BI and multi-SP phenomena by the input power and input wavelength could be very useful in all-optical nonlinear devices.

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