Reconfigurable silicon filter with continuous bandwidth tunability

• DOI: 10.1364/ol.37.003669
• Publication Date: 2012-08-28T15:18:54Z
• Authors: Piero Orlandi; Carlo Ferrari; Michael John Strain; Antonio Canciamilla; Francesco Morichetti; Marc Sorel; Paolo Bassi; Andrea Melloni
• Keywords: Free spectral range

We present the design and fabrication of compact tunable silicon-on-insulator bandpass filters based on integration a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with ring resonators activated via thermo-optic phase shifters. The proposed architecture provides wide filter bandwidth tunability from 10% to 90% free spectral range preserving off-band rejection. Possible applications are channel subset selection in wavelength division multiplexing optical systems, adaptive filtering signal bandwidth, reconfigurable for gridless networking.