Compact All-optical Buffers on a Silicon Chip

Compact all optical buffers on a silicon chip can be used for efficient buffering of light signal in interconnect networks. Sub-micron silicon waveguide on silicon-on-insulator (SOT) substrate provides tight light confinement in optical communication wavelength ranges. Compact ring resonators can be formed using a submicron silicon waveguide with a few microns of radius. Designing a light-buffering device by cascading multiple resonators with moderate quality factors simultaneously optimizes the device footprint and bandwidth. largest delay can be obtained. A buffering device containing 56 cascaded resonators in APF configuration, achieves a total delay of 5bps, and works up to a bit rate as high as 20Gbits, realizing a total buffering capacity of 10 bits.