Silicon Nano-Photonic Devices

This thesis deals with the design, fabrication and characterization of nano-photonic devices including ridge waveguide components, microring resonators, and photonic crystal components, and explore the potential for these devices in dierent applications ranging from optical communication to microwave systems and biosensing devices. An ultra-low loss inverse taper coupler for interfacing silicon ridge waveguides and optical bers is introduced and insertion losses of less than 1 dB are achieved for both transverse-electric (TE) and transversemagnetic (TM) polarizations. Integrated with the couplers, a silicon ridge waveguide is utilized in nonlinear all-optical signal processing for optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) systems. Record ultra-highspeed error-free optical demultiplexing and waveform sampling are realized and demonstrated for the rst time. Microwave phase shifters and notch lters based on tunable microring resonators are proposed and analyzed. Based on a single microring resonator, a maximum radio frequency (RF) phase shift of 336degrees is obtained, but with large power variation. By utilizing a dual-microring resonator, a RF phase shifting range larger than 2pi is achieved with small power variation. A widely tunable microwave notch lter is also experimentally demonstrated at 40 GHz. Other application such as pulse repetition rate multiplication by using microring resonator is also presented. Photonic crystal components are studied. Two dierent types of photonic crystal structures are analyzed concerning index sensitivity, dispersion engineering, and slow-light coupling. Several photonic crystal devices such as index sensor, slow-light coupler, and all-optical tunable cavity are presented.