Penalty-free transmission in a silicon coupled resonator optical waveguide over the full C-band

We show that optical signal propagation in a coupled resonator optical waveguide (CROW) does not introduce additional performance penalties with respect to propagation in a conventional optical waveguide. The result is demonstrated in a low-loss (1 dB) eight-ring silicon CROW by means of bit error rate measurements performed over the whole telecommunication C-band. An extensive characterization of the CROW parameters in terms of insertion loss, bandwidth, in-band intensity ripple, crosstalk, and sensitivity to thermal drifts is presented