Thermo-Optical Enhanced Silicon Wire Interleavers

Ring-resonator (RR) and ring-assisted (RA) Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) interleaver structures with thermo-optical fine tuning are proposed and fabricated on silicon-on-insulator. With thermo-optical fine tuning, the crosstalks are improved from ~12 to ~22 dB and from ~6 to ~17 dB for RR- and RA-MZI interleavers, respectively. In a wavelength range of 40 nm, the RR-MZI interleaver structure has more uniform responses whereas the RA-MZI interleaver structure has sharper rolloffs.