Design and fabrication of optical resonators

The design and fabrication of ring optical resonators for high-speed optical communication systems is the topic of this thesis. Its novelty is in two aspects: 1) Use of silicon wafers as an optical guiding medium; 2) Use of wafer bonding technique to attach two optical elements together. The structure consists of two optical waveguides, the bus waveguide and the drop channel waveguide. A ring on top of these waveguides couples them in such a way that only one narrow spectral line is removed from the bus waveguides which propagates in the drop-channel waveguide. The assembly is fabricated using wafer-bonding technique in silicon. A precise control over the waveguide dimensions, the ring dimensions and the distance between the ring and the waveguide is required for a specific spectral line to be coupled to the drop-channel waveguide. It is hoped that such fabrication techniques will enable the realization of high-speed large bandwidth integrated optical communication and sensor systems