Design and Characterization of a Novel Integrated Ring Resonator: Integrated photonics for optical communication and sensing

This work presents a novel ring resonator design. The demonstrated hybrid-waveguide ring resonator takes advantage of both, a highly effcient slot-waveguide based phase shifter and a low loss strip-waveguide in a single ring. The device is realized on 200 mm silicon-on-insulator wafers and covered by an electro-optic polymer in a post-processing step. The fabricated device has a small footprint and low optical losses, while at the same time a remarkable high electro-optical response in terms of DC device tunability is obtained. It is shown that the hybrid-waveguide ring resonator is a promising candidate for effcient optical switches, tunable flters, and modulators with low energy consumption. Moreover, the present work proposes the hybrid-waveguide ring resonator for on-chip optical sensing. It is shown that the innovative ring geometry provides the unique feature to increase the sensitivity while maintaining low optical losses. Thus, this resonator structure may represent a promising alternative approach for future integrated sensors.