Thermal insulation of silicon ring modulators in densely-packed photonic integrated circuits

Increasing data rates in the wireless access require high-bandwidth signal processing, which might be problematic for electronics. One solution is provided by high-bandwidth photonic signal processing in integrated silicon photonic devices. The transformation of electrical into optical signals and sometimes the photonic signal processing itself require a modulator. Especially silicon photonic ring modulators have the potential to significantly enhance the signal processing performance for large-scale integrated photonic circuits, since they have a very low footprint and power consumption. Nevertheless, densely packed integrated photonic devices show thermal crosstalk, which may lead to problems of heat dissemination in the chips. Here we will show, that a deep trench is a suitable method to avoid this problem. We present simulation results of crosstalk mitigation for ring modulators and show the improvement in the transmission characteristics.