A Temperature-Insensitive Third-Order Coupled-Resonator Filter for On-Chip Terabit/s Optical Interconnects

We design and demonstrate a temperature-insensitive third-order coupled-resonator filter in the silicon-on-insulator platform for on-chip terabit/s optical interconnects. Optimum filter design enables up to 21 flat-band filter channels with more than 10 dB through-port extinction, more than 0.75-nm 3-dB bandwidth, and less than 1-dB insertion loss. By overlaying a negative thermo-optic coefficient polymer cladding on top of the silicon device, the sensitivity of the filter performance to the ambient temperature variations is significantly reduced. Moreover, through careful balancing between the dispersion of the bandwidth and the thermal property of the filter, the redundant bandwidth of filter channels due to dispersion is employed as thermal guard bands. As a result, the filter can accommodate 21 wavelength-division-multiplexing channels with data rates up to 100 Gb/s per wavelength channel while providing sufficient thermal guard bands to tolerate more than ±15 °C temperature fluctuations in the on-chip environment.