Overview of Microring Resonators with Applications to a Tunable Bandpass Filter

摘要

We give here a detailed description of the operation of a microring resonator, including a mathematical derivation of the filter response for first order elements and analysis of higher order elements. We show that the operation is analogous to that of a Fabry-Perot resonator. We then describe the tunable bandpass filter made by Little Optics (LO).We discuss its architecture and specifications. Finally, data taken of the LO filter is shown and analyzed, concluding that the LO BPF has excellent out-of-band rejection, but in wideband applications it would perform poorly due to spurious peaks in the wideband filter response.