Integrated reconfigurable microring based silicon WDM receiver for on-chip optical interconnect

Abstract

We demonstrate an integrated reconfigurable wavelength division multiplexing receiver on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. The receiver is composed of a 1 × 8 thermally tunable microring resonator filter and Ge-Si photodetectors. With low thermal tuning powers the channel allocation of the receiver can be reconfigured with high accuracy and flexibility. The thermal tuning efficiency is approximately 8 mW nm −1 . We show eight-channel configurations with channel spacing of 100 GHz and 50 GHz and a configuration in which all eight channels cover an entire free spectral range of the ring with uniform channel spacing of 1.2 nm. Each channel can receive high-quality signals with a data rate of up to 13.5 Gb s −1 ; thus an aggregate data rate higher than 100 Gb s −1 can be achieved.