Thermal stabilization circuit for an optical ring resonator

Abstract

Disclosed is a thermal stabilization circuit including a heater, which is adjacent and thermally coupled to a closed-curve waveguide of an optical ring resonator, and an analog feedback circuit, which includes a fully autonomous analog feedback loop from a drop port of a bus waveguide of the optical ring resonator to the heater. This analog feedback circuit is configured to dynamically control the electrical power provided to the heater and, thereby to dynamically control the thermal output of the heater in order to tune the ring resonance wavelength to the operating laser wavelength. The analog feedback circuit is further configured to be independent of input power, to be power efficient, to have a relatively small footprint, to have a tunable time constant and to facilitate adjustable wavelength locking. Also disclosed is a device (e.g., a ring-based transceiver or the like), which includes multiple optical ring resonators and corresponding thermal stabilization circuits.