Thermally tunable integrated optical ring resonator with poly-Si thermistor

Doped polysilicon is applied as a thermo-optic heating element to temperature tune the ring resonator based on silicon nitride rib waveguides on silicon. The ring diameter is 2 mm allowing a large free spectral range of 26 GHz. For the first time, a poly-Si resistor is used as a thermistor to measure waveguide temperature. The temperature coefficient of the poly-Si thermistor is 9.5/spl times/10/sup -4///spl deg/C. The reproducibility of the temperature measurement is 0.3/spl deg/C. The finesse of the ring resonator is 77. The propagation loss of silicon nitride rib waveguide is 0.5 dB/cm at the wavelength of 1.312 /spl mu/m. The temperature tuning of the ring resonator and the in situ supervision of the temperature on chip based on the same poly-Si fabrication process may find use especially in optical sensor applications.