Electronically tunable silicon photonic delay lines

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Abstract

Electronically tunable optical true-time delay lines are proposed. The devices utilize the combination of apodised gratings and the free-carrier plasma effect to tune the enhanced delay of silicon waveguides at a fixed wavelength. Three variations of the proposed scheme are studied and compared. The compact and integrable devices can achieve tuning ranges as high as similar to 660 ps with a loss of < 2.2 dB when operated in the reflection mode of the gratings. A delay of similar to 40 ps with a loss of < 10 dB and an estimated operation bit rate of similar to 20 Gb/s can be achieved. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America