Optical interconnects have recently emerged as a promising solution for alleviating the bandwidth bottleneck in modern computing systems. However ultralow power photonic interconnects compatible with current CMOS microelectronics have not yet been demonstrated, mainly because the power needed to stabilize these photonic components with temperature is prohibitively high, due to the high thermo-optic coefficient of silicon.

The current invention is design to achieve complete passive thermal compensation of a silicon microring resonator, using a novel phenomenon of Mach-Zehnder interferometer assisted self-restoring thermal phase shifts. The new Mach-Zehnder design has the unique and novel property of negative temperature sensitivity. When it is coupled with a ring resonator having traditional positive temperature sensitivity, the resonance of the ring oscillates about a central wavelength instead of drifting away. Athermal operation of a ring resonator over 100 degrees has been demonstrated. A high bandwidth athermal WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) modulator system using this approach is also proposed. This novel class of devices could eliminate the long standing problem of thermal stability in silicon photonics, and enable the vision of realizing a 100fJ/bit optical interconnect for future computing systems.

Potential Applications

• On-chip optical switching

Advantages

• Passive thermal compensation
• Allows high performance optical interconnects

File Number: 4942