Ring Resonator Modulators in Silicon for Interchip Photonic Links

Abstract

Silicon photonics is the most promising pathway to achieve >10 Tb/s off-chip I/O bandwidth required by nextgeneration high-performance computing and switching systems. Ring resonator modulators offer the advantages of small footprint, low power, high efficiency, low loss, high speed, and CMOS compatibility for silicon photonic links. This paper presents an indepth discussion of practical microring modulators in silicon, covering their performance metrics, design tradeoffs, optimization, p-n junction geometries, complex ring configurations, and tuning solutions. Various demonstrated Si ring modulators are reviewed and potential future developments are briefly discussed.

Scalability of silicon photonic microring based switch

“…The size of the rings determines the periodicity of the resonances figure). [12], and thus the set optical frequencies which will be simultaneously switched by the rings. Hence entire wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) signals can be switched by a single ring.…”

Passively biased resonantly enhanced silicon photonics modulator with high optical bandwidth

“…Silicon Photonics technology is one of the leading candidates to fulfill all these requirements by leveraging standard CMOS design and manufacturing. The mainstream configurations of Silicon Photonics modulators are twofold: Ring Resonator Modulators (RRM) 5,6 and MachZehnder Modulators (MZM) 3,7 . RRMs leverage the resonance enhancement to reach high modulation efficiencies, are very compact and can be electrically driven as lumped elements.…”

Ultra-compact 320 Gb/s and 160 Gb/s WDM transmitters based on silicon microrings

“…This topic has taken on more excitement given that interconnection has been considered as the bottleneck for the next-generation computing systems [1]. Microring resonators are one of the most popular devices to form the key building blocks of on-chip network and optical interconnects, owing to small footprint, small capacitance and low power consumption.…”

“…Much progress has been made in the past decade in design and demonstrating microring-based modulators, filters, switches and lasers, etc. [1][2][3][4].…”