Power insensitive silicon microring resonators

We demonstrate power insensitive silicon microring resonators without the need for active feedback control. The passive control of the resonance is achieved by utilizing the compensation of two counteracting processes, free carrier dispersion blueshift and thermo-optic redshift. In the fabricated devices, the resonant wavelength shifts less than one resonance linewidth for dropped power up to 335 μW, more than fivefold improvement in cavity energy handling capability compared to regular microrings. © 2012 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 190.1450, 230.5750. Silicon microring resonators have revolutionized the field of silicon photonics for on-chip optical intercon-nects over the past decade. Optical interconnect net-works utilizing silicon microring-based devices present a solution to the electrical interconnect bottleneck by of-fering a larger bandwidth, lower power consumption, and smaller device footprint in microelectronic chips [1–3]. However, silicon microresonators have one main drawback; that is, the resonant wavelength shifts with in