On-chip interrogation of a silicon-on-insulator microring resonator based ethanol vapor sensor with an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) spectrometer

摘要

Silicon -on -insulator (SOI) optical microring resonators fabricated with the standard CMOS fabrication technology have recently gained considerable attention for energy efficient, compact and low cost biomedical and environmental sensing applications. High sensitivity to the surrounding refractive index variations, high compactness, direct wavelength multiplexing capabilities, simplicity, and the promise for mass fabrication are among the interesting features supported by SOI microring resonators. On the other hand, despite the strong case for microring resonators for sensing, there exist some issues which need to be addressed in order to ensure the feasibility of such sensors. One major limitation currently is the cost of optical sources and /or spectrum analyzers required to drive and interrogate these sensors. Either expensive light sources or spectrum analyzers are usually used with sensors built around microring resonators. An attractive approach to address this problem is the use of on-chip spectrometers along with cheap broadband light sources. We experimentally demonstrate on-chip interrogation of an SOI microring resonator based gas sensor with a compact Arrayed Waveguide Grating (AWG) spectrometer. We have designed and fabricated a 200GHz AWG with strongly overlapping output channels, and used it to interrogate the wavelength shift from a ring resonator based ethanol vapor sensor on the same chip. Ethanol vapor concentrations in 100-1000ppm range are readily detected by monitoring the intensity ratio between two adjacent AWG channels to which the microring resonance overlaps. Such an integrated sensor-interrogator approach is presented as an alternative to the current costly and off-chip read-out systems used for ring resonator based sensors.