Reconfigurable multichannel amplitude equalizer based on cascaded silicon photonic microrings
Changping Zhang, Shujun Liu, Hao Yan, Dajian Liu, Long Zhang, Huan Li, Yaocheng Shi, Liu Liu, Daoxin Dai
Abstract
A compact on-chip reconfigurable multichannel amplitude equalizer based on cascaded elliptical microrings is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. With the optimized structure of the elliptical microring with adiabatically varied radii/widths, the average excess loss for each channel in the initialized state is measured to be less than 0.5 dB, while the attenuation dynamic range can be over 20 dB. Flexible tunability through the overlapping of the resonance peaks of adjacent wavelength-channels enables even higher attenuation dynamic ranges up to 50 dB. Leveraging the thermo-optic effect and fine wavelength-tuning linearity, precise tuning of the resonance peak can be implemented, enabling dynamic power equalization of each wavelength-channel in wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) systems and optical frequency combs. The proposed architecture exhibits excellent scalability, which can facilitate the development of long-haul optical transport networks and high-capacity neuromorphic computing systems, while improving the overall performance of optical signals in WDM-related systems.