Silicon microring resonators with 1.

5-μm radius
Qianfan Xu, David Fattal, and Raymond G. Beausoleil
Hewlett-Packard Labs, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304
[email protected]

Abstract: We demonstrate a junction between a silicon strip waveguide

and an ultra-compact silicon microring resonator that minimizes spurious
light scattering and increases the critical dimensions of the geometry. We
show cascaded silicon microring resonators with radii around 1.5 μm and
effective mode volumes around 1.0 μm3 that are critically coupled to a
waveguide with coupled Q’s up to 9,000. The radius of 1.5 μm is smaller
than the operational wavelength, and is close to the theoretical size limit of
the silicon microring ring resonator for the same Q. The device is fabricated
with a widely-available SEM-based lithography system using a stitch-free
design based on a U-shaped waveguide.
©2008 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: (130.3120) Integrated optics devices; (230.5750) Resonators.

References and links

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#91188 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Jan 2008; revised 8 Mar 2008; accepted 12 Mar 2008; published 14 Mar 2008
(C) 2008 OSA 17 March 2008 / Vol. 16, No. 6 / OPTICS EXPRESS 4309
 16. F. Xia, L. Sekaric, and Y. A. Vlasov, “Mode conversion losses in silicon-on-insulator photonic wire based
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http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=oe-14-9-3872.

1. Introduction
To satisfy the extraordinary interconnect requirements of many-core chips during the next
decade, a massively parallel photonic network has to be built on-chip. Recent developments
in CMOS-compatible integrated optoelectronic components, including lasers [1,2], filters [3-
5], modulators[6-8], and photodetectors [9] have been very promising. However, the high
integration density and low power consumption necessary for such a photonic network
requires optical devices with even smaller dimensions than that have been demonstrated to
date. The silicon microring resonator is a popular choice for such an application because it
has small size, high quality factor Q, transparency to off-resonance light, and no intrinsic
reflection. The silicon microring resonator can act as an optical filter [4,5], and it can be made
into electro-optical modulators [7,10,11], lasers [2] and detectors when carrier injection,
optical gain or optical absorption mechanisms are incorporated. This list includes almost all
of the optical devices required for the on-chip photonic network.
While a smaller size is universally desirable for most applications of microring resonators
for similar reasons, here we concentrate on electro-optical modulation and summarize the
benefits of small size on microring modulators. Compact and high-speed electro-optic
modulators based on silicon microring resonators have been demonstrated experimentally
[7,10]. Microring modulators with different resonant wavelengths can be cascaded to form a
wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) modulation system [11]. For such modulators, a
small size is critical for several reasons. First, a smaller size means that more modulators can
be fit into a given area, therefore providing higher integration density. Second and more
importantly, the power consumption of the modulator, which is a key performance factor for
the eletro-optical modulators, is directly proportional to the circumference and inversely
proportional to the optical quality factor Q of the microring resonator. Reducing the size of
the ring without sacrificing the Q is critical for low-power operation. Thirdly, the total
bandwidth of the microring-based WDM modulation system [11] is limited by the free-
spectral range (FSR) of the microring resonator, which is inversely proportional to the
circumference of the ring. A smaller microring modulator has a larger FSR, which can fit in
more wavelength channels and have higher aggregated data bandwidth. Given the tremendous
benefits of a small size for optoelectronic devices based on the microring resonator, our goal
here is to show the lower limit for the size of a high-Q silicon microring.
2. The minimal radius for microring resonators
The microring resonator is formed by tightly bent silicon-on-insulator (SOI) strip waveguide
[13,14]. The optical mode in a bent dielectric waveguide is always a leaky mode, with a
bending loss that increases as the bending radius decreases. Therefore, at a given resonant
wavelength, a microring resonator with a smaller radius will have a lower intrinsic Q.
The black squares in Fig. 1 show the relationship between the radius (measured to the
center of the waveguide) and the intrinsic Q of the ring obtained from a 3D finite-difference
time-domain (FDTD) simulation. In the simulation, we choose a waveguide with a
rectangular cross-section of 450 nm × 250 nm, which is close to the maximal dimension for a
single-mode SOI strip waveguide for the quasi-TE mode at a wavelength around 1.55 μm.
The silicon ring is fully surrounded by silicon dioxide. The simulated radii are chosen so that
the resonant wavelengths are within 1546.0 ± 2.2 nm. The data points in Fig. 1 can be fitted
very well with a straight line (the dashed line in Fig. 1) on the log-linear scale, showing that
the intrinsic Q of a microring resonator increases exponentially with radius of the ring. The
intrinsic Q approximately doubles for each 0.1-μm increase in radius. The bending loss of the
ring is inversely proportional to the intrinsic Q [11] and is shown on the right y axis in Fig. 1.

#91188 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Jan 2008; revised 8 Mar 2008; accepted 12 Mar 2008; published 14 Mar 2008
(C) 2008 OSA 17 March 2008 / Vol. 16, No. 6 / OPTICS EXPRESS 4310
 To determine the minimal radius for a particular application, one needs to first determine
the optimal Q for that application. When the microring resonator is used as a high-speed
modulator, a higher Q is beneficial to reduce power consumption [10], but when the Q is too
high, it limits the maximum modulation frequency and causes high temperature sensitivity.
For a modulator working at 10–20 Gbit/s, a moderately high operating Q on the order of
10,000, which corresponds to an optical bandwidth of ~ 20 GHz, is appropriate for the
critically coupled resonator, which requires an intrinsic Q of 20,000. From Fig. 1, one can
conclude that the minimal radius to obtain an intrinsic Q of 20,000 around the wavelength of
1.55 μm is 1.37 μm.

1
5
10

Bending loss (cm )

-1
10
Q

4
10

100
3
10
1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6
Radius (μm)
Fig. 1. The optical quality factor Q and waveguide bending loss versus the radius of a
microring resonator obtained from a 3D FDTD simulation.

The simulation results shown above only include the fundamental (intrinsic) bending loss.
The scattering loss caused by the sidewall roughness will further decrease the Q of the
resonator. Therefore, for the following theoretical and experimental work, we choose a
slightly larger radius of 1.5 μm, which has an intrinsic Q of 46,600 without sidewall
roughness. This higher theoretical value for the intrinsic Q gives some margin for degradation
due to scattering loss. The effective mode volume of this 1.5-μm microring resonator is
calculated to be only 1.0 μm3.
3. Coupling to ultra-compact microring resonators
A microring resonator is normally coupled to a straight waveguide with the same width [7]. It
is critically-coupled [15] to the waveguide when the one-pass optical coupling between the
ring and the waveguide matches the round-trip optical loss in the ring. For a microring
resonator with radius as small as 1.5 μm, it is difficult to obtain the critical coupling due to
the extremely short interaction length. In order to be critically coupled to the waveguide, a
microring resonator with 1.5-μm radius and an intrinsic Q of 20,000 should have a 0.8% one-
pass power coupling coefficient to the waveguide. Even though the coupling strength needed
is relatively low, it still requires a narrow gap between the ring and the waveguide, due to the
short interaction length and the high confinement nature of the waveguides. The small gap is
not only difficult to fabricate, but also dramatically increases the optical loss and reduces the
Q of the ring [16], as we will show next.

#91188 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Jan 2008; revised 8 Mar 2008; accepted 12 Mar 2008; published 14 Mar 2008
(C) 2008 OSA 17 March 2008 / Vol. 16, No. 6 / OPTICS EXPRESS 4311
 To investigate the single-pass optical coupling between a straight waveguide and the bent
waveguide forming the ring, we ran a 3D FDTD simulation on the structure shown in Fig.
2(a), where the outlines of the waveguides are shown in gray. The field has a quasi-TE
polarization and is launched relatively far from the coupler and sent to the curved waveguide
(having a radius of 1.5 μm) using a section of horizontal waveguide, and is then partially
coupled into the vertical waveguide. Both the straight and the curved waveguides have a
rectangular cross-section of 450 nm × 250 nm, and the wavelength is 1.55 μm. The color
scale image in Fig. 2(a) is a snap shot of the Hz component at the central plane of the
waveguides.
One can see from Fig. 2(a) that the modes in the straight waveguide and the curved
waveguide are not well phase-matched. Because the tightly bent waveguide breaks the
symmetry in the coupling region, the phase matching condition is no longer satisfied between
waveguides with identical dimensions. The phase mismatch not only reduces the coupling
efficiency, but also creates higher-order mode components, which distort the fields in the
straight waveguide. These higher-order components will eventually radiate to the
environment as it propagates along the straight waveguide, since the waveguide can only
guide the fundamental mode. Therefore, the coupling to the higher-order component will
create an additional source of radiation loss for the ring, and degrade the intrinsic Q of the
microring resonator, which makes it even harder to achieve critical coupling. In the fabricated
devices, the Q’s of 1.5-μm-radius microring resonators critically coupled to a waveguide with
the same width of 450 nm are consistently measured below 3,000. In order to be critically
couple to the ring with the lower intrinsic Q, the gap between the waveguide and the ring
needs to be reduced to ~100 nm, which is hard to fabricate and to control precisely.

Fig. 2. FDTD simulated field coupling from a curved waveguide with 1.5-μm radius to a
straight waveguide at the wavelength of 1.55 μm. The plotted field component is Hz at the
central plane of the waveguide and the ring. Deeper red means more positive field and deeper
blue means more negative field. (a): both straight and bent waveguides are 450-nm wide. The
gap between them is 100 nm. (b) the straight waveguide is 250-nm wide and the bent
waveguide is 450-nm wide, with a 200 nm gap between them

Figure 2(a) shows that the mode of the curved waveguide extends concentrically at the
outward side. Since the straight waveguide is farther from the center, one can speculate that if
the mode of the straight waveguide had a longer spatial period, it would have a better phase
match with the concentric mode in the tightly curved waveguide. A waveguide mode with
longer spatial period needs to have a lower effective index, which can be obtained by
reducing the width of the waveguide. Figure 2(b) shows the optical field when light couples
from the curved waveguide to a straight waveguide with a reduced width of 250 nm and a
lower effective index of 1.7 for the quasi-TE mode, compared to the effective index of 2.5 in

#91188 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Jan 2008; revised 8 Mar 2008; accepted 12 Mar 2008; published 14 Mar 2008
(C) 2008 OSA 17 March 2008 / Vol. 16, No. 6 / OPTICS EXPRESS 4312
the 450-nm-wide waveguide. One can see from the Fig. 2(b) that the mode in the narrower
waveguide with longer spatial period has a better phase match with the concentric mode in
the curved waveguide, and much weaker higher-order components are excited, which is
evident from the symmetry of the field in the straight waveguide.
In addition, the mode of the narrower waveguide decays more slowly in the cladding
because of the lower effective index. Therefore, it has a higher mode overlap with the
adjacent ring, and the gap between the ring and the waveguide can be increased. With the 250
nm wide waveguide, we can obtain the desired 0.8% power coupling with a gap of over 400
nm according to the FDTD simulation. The larger gap is much easier to fabricate and to
control, and all the critical dimensions of the device are well within the reach of optical
lithography.
Another possible way of increasing the optical coupling coefficient between the
waveguide and the ring is to add a straight section in the coupling region of the ring and form
a racetrack structure [16]. This approach, however, will dramatically reduce the intrinsic Q of
the resonator because of the mode mismatch between the straight and tightly curved sections
of the racetrack waveguide, since the light experiences losses from this mode mismatch four
times during each trip around the racetrack structure. A 3D FDTD simulation shows that,
when adding a 0.5-μm-long straight waveguide section to a 1.5-μm-radius ring, the intrinsic
Q of the resonator drops from 46,600 to below 2,000. Apparently, the racetrack structure is
not a good solution to the coupling problem in an ultra-compact resonator.
4. Device design and fabrication
The device is fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator substrate with 3-μm buried oxide using a
scanning electron microscope (SEM)-based e-beam lithography system. The pattern is first
defined on a layer of negative e-beam resist (Fox-12) by an externally controlled SEM with
an accelerating voltage of 30 kV. The pattern is then etched into the silicon layer using an
HBr-based reactive ion etching process. The device is then spin-coated with a ~2-μm thick
Polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA) layer in order to match the refractive indices of the upper
cladding and lower cladding of the waveguide.
While SEM-based e-beam lithography systems are widely available in most university
campuses, they are traditionally viewed as unsuitable for fabricating devices based on sub-
micron silicon waveguides. The main reason for this belief is that SEM-based systems cannot
precisely stitch the writing fields (normally a few hundred microns wide); therefore any
waveguide crossing the boundary of the writing fields will be broken. As a result, most of the
experimental works on sub-micron silicon waveguides have been done using dedicated (but
very expensive) e-beam writers, where mm-long waveguides can be fabricated by precisely
stitching multiple writing fields. The mm-long waveguides are believed to be necessary to run
from edge to edge on the chip for optical input and output coupling on both edges.
By contrast, we designed the U-shaped waveguide shown in Fig. 3(b), where the whole
length of the waveguide is fitted within one writing field. Since the waveguide never crosses a
field boundary, no precise stitching of the field is required. Based on this design, one can
fabricate and test silicon nanophotonic devices coupled to sub-micron waveguides using an
SEM-based lithography system, which has much lower cost and wider availability in
academic institutes than dedicated e-beam writers.

#91188 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Jan 2008; revised 8 Mar 2008; accepted 12 Mar 2008; published 14 Mar 2008
(C) 2008 OSA 17 March 2008 / Vol. 16, No. 6 / OPTICS EXPRESS 4313
 Fig. 3. (a): An SEM picture with 40º titled view of the microring resonator with 1.5-μm radius
coupled to a waveguide with reduced width. (b): A microscope picture of the cascaded
microring resonators coupled to a U-shaped waveguide at the edge of the chip.

Figure 3(a) shows an SEM picture of a microring resonator with a radius of 1.5 μm before
it was cladded with PMMA. Both the waveguide and the ring have a height of 250 nm and
sidewall angle of ~ 84º. The waveguide forming the ring has an average width of ~440 nm.
The straight waveguide coupling to the ring has an average width of ~290 nm, and the gap
between the waveguide and the ring is ~340 nm. The width of the straight waveguide used in
the FDTD simulation happens to equal the height of the waveguide. Here, in order to avoid
the cross-coupling between the quasi-TE mode and quasi-TM mode in a square waveguide,
we increased the width of the straight waveguide. This ring is one of the five rings coupled to
the same waveguide, as shown in the top-view microscopic picture in Fig. 3(b). The five rings
are designed to have slightly different radius, so that their resonances are uniformly
distributed throughout the FSR.
5. Optical measurement setup and results
Figure 4(a) shows the experimental setup for measuring the transmission spectrum of the
device. The output of a tunable laser is collimated and focused by a lens onto one end of the
U-shaped waveguide. The output light at the other end of the U-shaped waveguide is
collimated by the same lens and sent to a detector. A polarizer is placed in front of the
detector to separate the quasi-TE and quasi-TM modes.
Figure 4(b) shows the normalized transmission spectrum of the quasi-TE mode. The
resonance features from the five microring resonators coupled to the waveguide (see Fig.
3(b)) can be identified on the spectrum. Figure 4(c) shows the spectrum around the second
resonance in Fig. 4(b). The FWHM width of the resonance is 0.17 nm, corresponding to a Q
of 9,000, close to our target of 10,000. The extinction ratio of the resonance is ~16 dB,
showing that the ring is close to being critically coupled to the waveguide. Therefore, the
intrinsic Q of the ring is about twice the coupled Q, or 18,000. This is lower than the
simulated intrinsic Q mainly because of the scattering loss from the sidewall roughness. To
estimate the level of scattering loss, we measured an intrinsic Q of ~ 40,000 on microring
resonators with radii of 2.5 μm, which is primarily due to scattering loss, since the bending
loss at this radius (can be estimated by extending the line in Fig. 1) is negligible. If a 1.5- μm-
radius ring has the same scattering loss, it would have an intrinsic Q of ~21,500. The
measured Q of the 1.5- μm-radius ring (18,000) is slightly lower than the above calculation,
showing that the 1.5- μm-radius ring has a slightly higher scattering loss. This is mainly
because the optical spatial mode in a smaller ring shifts more to the outer side of the ring, and
therefore has higher overlap with the sidewalls. From the transmission spectrum, the FSR of

#91188 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Jan 2008; revised 8 Mar 2008; accepted 12 Mar 2008; published 14 Mar 2008
(C) 2008 OSA 17 March 2008 / Vol. 16, No. 6 / OPTICS EXPRESS 4314
the 1.5-μm-radius microring resonator is measured to be 62.5 nm, from which a group index
of 4.2 is calculated [11], which agrees well with that measured in similar devices [5].

Fig. 4. (a): Schematic of the experimental setup for measuring the transmission spectrum of
the device. (b): The transmission spectrum of five cascaded microring resonators, showing the
resonant dips from all 5 rings. (c): Zoom-in spectrum around the second resonance in (b).

6. Summary
In conclusion, we have designed a junction between a silicon strip waveguide and an ultra-
compact silicon microring resonator that minimizes spurious light scattering and increases the
critical dimensions of the geometry. We fabricated a network of compact micro-rings
critically coupled to strip waveguides, with ring radii as small as 1.5 μm, and were able to
measure a coupled Q of 9,000, close to our target of 10,000. They have smaller radius, larger
FSR and higher Q than the previously demonstrated microring resonators [4,5]. Their radii
are smaller than the wavelength of light and are close to the theoretical limit of ~ 1.37 μm for
the targeted Q. The device fabrication was realized with a widely-available SEM-based
lithography system using a stitch-free design based on a U-shaped waveguide. The smallest
feature in the design is ~300 nm in size, which is well within the reach of optical lithography.

#91188 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Jan 2008; revised 8 Mar 2008; accepted 12 Mar 2008; published 14 Mar 2008
(C) 2008 OSA 17 March 2008 / Vol. 16, No. 6 / OPTICS EXPRESS 4315