A compact wavelength demultiplexing structure based on arrayed metal-insulator-metal (MIM) slot cavities is proposed and demonstrated numerically. The structure consists of a bus waveguide perpendicularly coupled with a series of slot cavities, each of which captures SPPs at the resonance frequency from the bus waveguide and tunes the transmission wavelength by changing its geometrical parameters. A cavity theory model is used to design the operating wavelengths of the structure. Moreover, single band transmission of each channel and the adjustable transmission bandwidth can be obtained by altering the drop waveguide positions and the coupling distance. The proposed arrayed slot cavity-based structure could be utilized to develop ultracompact optical wavelength demultiplexing device for large-scale photonic integration.

An ultra-compact surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) narrow band-pass filter based on a slot cavity is proposed and numerically investigated. Attributed to the coupled resonances in the cavity, the filter demonstrates pass-band selection capability. Also, by varying the positions of output waveguides, the filter shows the spectrally splitting function. Moreover, the combination of the adjustments to the length/width of the slot cavity and to the coupling distance provides more flexibility in design for the locations and widths of the pass-bands of the proposed filter.

We analyze the resonance spectrum in silicon microring resonators taking into account the end-facet reflection from a coupled waveguide, which can provide a dense set of Fabry-Perot resonances. Based on the simple configuration of a microring coupled with a waveguide, the resulting asymmetric Fano-like non-Lorentzian resonance is obtained by scattering theory and experiment. Enhanced sensing performance with steeper slope to the resonance is theoretically predicted and experimentally demonstrated for a 10-microm racetrack silicon microring resonator. A high sensitivity of approximately 10(-8) RIU in terms of the detection limit is obtained in a 30-dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) system.

Dual-microring-resonator interference with the microrings on separate arms of a Mach–Zehnder interferometer is shown to provide the basis for high-performance sensors. The output spectrum, which depends on the overlap of the resonances of the two microring resonators, depends sensitively on the resonance shift of one of the microrings due to the presence of an analyte. The sensitivity and detection limit are obtained theoretically and found to be as large as 0.31 nm overlap resonance shift according to 2×10−6 refractive index units for Si-based sensors.

We demonstrate error-free 80km transmission by a silicon carrier-depletion Mach-Zehnder modulator at 10Gbps and the power penalty is as low as 1.15dB. The devices were evaluated through the bit-error-rate characterizations under the system-level analysis. The silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator was also analyzed comparatively with a lithium niobate Mach-Zehnder modulator in back-to-back transmission and long-haul transmission, respectively, and verified the negative chirp parameter of the silicon modulator through the experiment. The result of low power penalty indicates a practical application for the silicon modulator in the middle- or long-distance transmission systems.