Silicon-based on-chip electrically tunable sidewall Bragg grating Fabry-Perot filter

We report the design, fabrication, and testing of a silicon-based on-chip electrically tunable sidewall Bragg grating Fabry-Perot filter. Spectral measurement shows that the filter has a narrow notch in reflection of approximately 46 pm, a Q-factor of 33,500, and an extinction ratio of 16.4 dB. DC measurement shows that the average central wavelength shift rates with forward and reverse bias are -1.15 nm/V and 4.2 pm/V, respectively. Due to strong light confinement in the Fabry-Perot cavity, the electrooptic frequency response shows that the filter has a 3-dB modulation bandwidth of similar to 5.6 GHz. The performance of using the filter to perform modulation of a 3.5 Gb/s 2(7)- 1 nonreturn-to-zero pseudorandom binary sequence is evaluated. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America