Mode conversion losses in silicon-on-insulator photonic wire based racetrack resonators

Two complementary types of SOI photonic wire based devices, the add/drop (A/D) filter using a racetrack resonator and the Mach-Zehnder interferometer with one arm consisting of an identical resonator in all-pass filter (APF) configuration, were fabricated and characterized in order to extract the optical properties of the resonators and predict the performance of the optical delay lines based on such resonators. We found that instead of well-known waveguide bending and propagation losses, mode conversion loss in the coupling region of such resonators dominates when the air gap between the racetrack resonator and access waveguide is smaller than 120nm. We also show that this additional loss significantly degrades the performance of the optical delay line containing cascaded resonators in APF configuration. © 2006 Optical Society of America.