Small-Signal Analysis of All-Si Microring Resonator Photodiode

Abstract

All-silicon microring resonator photodiodes are attractive for silicon photonics integrated circuits due to their compactness, wavelength division multiplexing ability, and the absence of germanium growth. To analyze and evaluate the performance of the microring photodiode, we derived closed-form expression of the response transfer function with both electrical and optical behavior included, using a small-signal analysis. The thermo-optic nonlinearity resulting from optical loss and ohmic heating was simulated and considered in the model. The predicted response achieved close agreement with the experiment results, which provides an intuitive understanding of device performance. We analytically investigated the responsivity–bandwidth product and demonstrated that the performance is superior when the detuning frequency is zero.