Silicon High-Order Coupled-Microring-Based Electro-Optical Switches for On-Chip Optical Interconnects

We demonstrate an electro-optically (EO) tunable switch using tenth-order coupled-microring resonators in silicon-on-insulator using complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor fabrication technology. The measured drop-port transmission spectra show box-like transmission passband with ~100-GHz bandwidth and ~50-dB extinction ratio. With a DC voltage supply to the integrated p-i-n diodes surrounding the microrings, the optical switch shows, respectively, ~10 and ~45-dB on/off ratios from throughputand drop-port. The measured EO switching times are ~1 ns upon a 1.2-Vpp low-speed driving signal and a DC power consumption of ~37 mW. Up to 30-Gb/s pseudorandom binary sequence (2
³¹
-1) signal transmissions suggest high-data-rate signal switching capability.