There has been a recent trend to reduce the size of photonic waveguide devices to enable high-density integration in silicon photonic integrated circuits. However, this miniaturization tends to result in increased polarization dependency. Particularly challenging is designing devices based on ring waveguides with small radii, which exacerbates the polarization sensitivity. For these microring resonators, a legitimate question is then: Is it possible to simultaneously maintain the conditions of single-mode and structural polarization independence while shrinking the size of both the bend radius and the waveguide cross section, and, if so, how small can the ring resonator be? We demonstrate theoretically the feasibility of achieving this via deeply etched submicrometer silicon-on-insulator rib waveguides, and we show that, for a given cladding and core thickness, the radius of a polarization independent microring resonator can be as small as $3\mathrm{\mu m}$ , being limited chiefly by the residual birefringence of the resonator cavity and the bend losses.

© 2009 Optical Society of America

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Citation lists with outbound citation links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Log in to access OSA Member Subscription

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Log in to access OSA Member Subscription

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Figure files are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Log in to access OSA Member Subscription

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Article level metrics are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Log in to access OSA Member Subscription

Related Journal Articles

• Air-trench splitters for ultra-compact ring resonators in low refractive index contrast waveguides (OE)
• Etched beam splitters in InP/InGaAsP (OE)
• Simultaneous implementation of XOR and XNOR operations using a directed logic circuit based on two microring resonators (OE)
• Microring-resonator-based four-port optical router for photonic networks-on-chip (OE)
• Five-port optical router for photonic networks-on-chip (OE)

Related Conference Papers

• Diffractionless optical micro-circuitry in an inverse opal photonic band gap heterostructure
• Tunable Slow-Wave Optical Delay-Lines
• Tunable Optical Delay on Silicon Chip with a Double-Ring Resonator
• Experimental Realization of an On-Chip All-Optical Analogue to Electromagnetically Induced Transparency
• The World’s First InP 8x8 Monolithic Tunable Optical Router (MOTOR) Operating at 40 Gbps Line Rate per Port
• The World’s First InP 8x8 Monolithic Tunable Optical Router (MOTOR) Operating at 40 Gbps Line Rate per Port