Thermo-optical tunable planar ridge microdisk resonator in silicon-on-insulator

In this work, we design and demonstrate planar ridge microdisk resonators in silicon-on-insulator, which assemble the advantages of microring and microdisk resonators. The dependences of resonator optical modes on the slab thickness and the waveguide-to-resonator coupling gap are investigated. The highest Q-factor obtained is similar to 4 x 10(5). Using the thermo-optical effect, we attain a resonance wavelength tuning efficiency of similar to 66.5 pm/mW. We also compare the transmission spectra measured by using wavelength-scanning method and voltage-scanning method and show potential application for the adopted voltage-scanning method. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America