Simulation and Measurements of Chirp Penalties for Silicon Ring Resonator Modulators

Due to its compact size and its ability for wavelength dense multiplexing (WDM) implementation with low-insertion-loss, silicon ring resonator modulator (Si-RRM) is acknowledged to be a good candidate for off-board escape with demand for increased bandwidth densities (>1000 Gb/s/cm²) up to 2 km (intradata centers). Passive optical network with transmission reach up to ~50 km is another application where Si-RRMs could be of great interest (WDM and NGPON2 PONs). Nevertheless, one known characteristic of the Si-RRM is its inherent phase modulation when achieving intensity modulation, which leads to a modification of the transmission properties after propagation over a few kilometers of single-mode fiber (SMF). In this letter, we propose a model for simulating chirp effects of modulated Si-RRMs, and measure the associated transmission penalties over several SMF lengths. Simulations and measurements show to be in good agreement.