Demonstration of a fast-reconfigurable silicon CMOS optical lattice filter

We demonstrate a fully-reconfigurable fourth-order optical lattice filter built by cascading identical unit cells consisting of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and a ring resonator. The filter is fabricated using a commercial silicon complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process and reconfigured by current injection into p-i-n diodes with a reconfiguration time of less than 10 ns. The experimental results show full control over the single unit cell pole and zero, switching the unit cell transfer function between a notch filter and a bandpass filter, narrowing the notch width down to 400 MHz, and tuning the center wavelength over the full free spectral range (FSR) of 10 GHz. Theoretical and experimental results show tuning dynamics and associated optical losses in the reconfigurable filters. The full-control of each of the four cascaded single unit cells resulted in demonstrations of a number of fourth-order transfer functions. The multimedia experimental data show live tuning and reconfiguration of optical lattice filters. (C)2011 Optical Society of America