Vacuum-sealed silicon photonic MEMS tunable ring resonator with an independent control over coupling and phase

Abstract

Ring resonators are a vital element for filters, optical delay lines, or sensors in silicon photonics. However, reconfigurable ring resonators with low-power consumption are not available in foundries today. We demonstrate an add-drop ring resonator with the independent tuning of round-trip phase and coupling using low-power microelectromechanical (MEMS) actuation. At a wavelength of 1540 nm and for a maximum voltage of 40 V, the phase shifters provide a resonance wavelength tuning of 0.15 nm, while the tunable couplers can tune the optical resonance extinction ratio at the through port from 0 to 30 dB. The optical resonance displays a passive quality factor of 29 000, which can be increased to almost 50 000 with actuation. The MEMS rings are individually vacuum-sealed on wafer scale, enabling reliable and long-term protection from the environment. We cycled the mechanical actuators for more than 4 × 109 cycles at 100 kHz, and did not observe degradation in their response curves. On mechanical resonance, we demonstrate a modulation increase of up to 15 dB, with a voltage bias of 4 V and a peak drive amplitude as low as 20 mV.