High quality factor and high confinement silicon resonators using etchless process

We demonstrate high quality factor and high confinement in a silicon ring resonator fabricated by a thermal oxidation process. We fabricated a 50 mu m bending radius racetrack resonator, with a 5 mu m coupling region. We achieved an intrinsic quality factor of 760,000 for the fundamental TM mode, which corresponds to a propagation loss of 0.9 dB/cm. Both the fundamental TE and TM modes are highly confined in the waveguide, with effective indices of 3.0 for the TE mode and 2.9 for the TM mode. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America