The impact of temperature and coupling coefficient on 4X4 micro-ring switch operation

The four-port rings simulated are assumed to be fabricated in a Silicon on Insulator process as described in [1]. The ring radius was 10 μm. A 65K temperature rise was found to shift the resonance of the ring through half the FSR from on-resonance to off-resonance (see Fig. 1b). A coupling coefficient of 0.12 was found to match the bandwidth given in [1]. Simulations were then undertaken for a wide variety of conditions. The basic approach was using the switch configuration shown in Fig. 1a to excite all four ports with pseudo-random bit streams. Eye diagrams were then constructed for all outputs and the effect of cross-talk analyzed. Using this approach simulations were run for a variety of coupling coefficients, ring offset temperatures (de-tuning) and bit rates.