Demonstration of a fourth-order pole-zero optical filter integrated using CMOS processes

We demonstrate a compact fully tunable narrowband fourth-order pole-zero optical filter that is fabricated in a silicon complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor foundry. The filter is implemented using silicon on oxide channel waveguides and consists of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with two ring resonator all-pass filters (APFs) on each arm. The filter architecture is based on the sum and difference of the APFs responses. The ring resonators introduce a nonlinear phase response in each arm that allows carving narrow frequency bands out of a broad spectrum. In this paper, we demonstrate a 3-dB filter bandwidth of 1.0 GHz with a stopband rejection of better than 25 dB. The filter free spectral range is 16.5 GHz. Thermooptic phase shifters are used to tune the filter. As silicon has a large thermooptic coefficient compared to silica, the demonstrated filter requires a low tuning power of less than 300 mW. In addition, this filter is compact with dimensions 25 times smaller than the same filter would be if it were made using standard silica on silicon waveguides with a 0.8% step index contrast.