IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO.

15, AUGUST 1, 2006 1597

Design and Analysis of Resonant Cavity

Enhanced-Waveguide Photodetectors for
Microwave Photonics Applications
Gholamreza Abaeiani, Vahid Ahmadi, and Kamyar Saghafi

Abstract—New structures for high quantum efficiency, high

speed, and wavelength-selective photodetectors (PDs) are pro-
posed. Regarding the main advantages of both resonant-cavity-
enhanced (RCE) PDs and waveguide PDs (WGPDs) and the use
of resonant behavior of microring waveguides, we present RCE-
WGPD. The fundamental equation for quantum efficiency of
microring PDs is derived and the important features of the device
such as improvement of efficiency and wavelength selectivity are
discussed.
Index Terms—Integrated optics, microring resonators, optical
waveguide, photodetectors (PDs), resonant-cavity-enhanced
(RCE).

I. INTRODUCTION
HE high-efficiency high-bandwidth photodetectors (PDs)
T are the key components for optical communication and mi-
crowave photonics. With increasing importance of wavelength-
division multiplexing (WDM), the wavelength selectivity and
wavelength tuning are also desired for PDs. Waveguide PDs
(WGPDs) offer the advantages of high speed along with high
quantum efficiency but they show a broad spectral response
[1]. Resonant-cavity-enhanced PDs (RCE-PDs) provide high
quantum efficiency along with high speed and a narrow spec-
tral response [2]–[4]. However, their performance is related to
some issues such as mirror design, standing wave effect, and op- Fig. 1. (a) MRPD, (b) Top view and optical model of MRPD.
tical input incident angle [5]. Recently, ring and disk microres-
onator-based devices have attracted great interest because they
are wavelength-selective and compact [6], [7]. Using the mi- or partially active. Fig. 1(a) shows the completely active case.
croring resonators, we extend the resonant detection concept for Fig. 1(b) illustrates the top view of MRPD and the optical model
WGPDs to take the advantages of both RCE-PDs and WGPDs. used in the analysis of quantum efficiency. Under the conditions
We expect, with this structure, one can obtain selective wave- that a single unidirectional mode of the resonator is excited and
length detection along with high efficiency-bandwidth product. the coupling is lossless, interaction of incident and circulating
field can be described by interaction matrix as [8]
II. MICRORING-BASED PDs
(1)
A. Microring PDs (MRPDs)
The schematic of proposed MRPD is shown in Fig. 1(a). For where and are transmission and coupling coefficients,
simplicity, we consider a PD consisting of a conventional PIN and are electrical field component of input and output op-
photodiode and a ring waveguide resonator which is coupled to tical wave to straight waveguide and and are feed and
a straight waveguide. The microring section can be completely transmission fields of ring waveguide, respectively. After one
turn around the ring, the transmission field is given by
Manuscript received February 27, 2006; revised May 10, 2006.
G. Abaeiani and V. Ahmadi are with the Department of Electrical Engi-
neering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran, and also with Laser Research (2)
Center, Tehran 11368-8486, Iran (e-mail: v_ahmadi@modares.ac.ir).
K. Saghafi is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Shahed Univer-
sity, Tehran, Iran. where and are confinement factor, material absorp-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2006.879554 tion coefficient, phase shift coefficient, and resonator length, re-
1041-1135/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE
1598
Fig. 2. Wavelength dependency for quantum efficiency of MRPD (R
5 m and n = 3:45).
spectively. Also and , where is
wavelength, is refractive index, and is effective ring ra-
dius. Therefore, the optical power absorbed in active layer
can be obtained as
where and are optical power of feed and transmission
fields, respectively [9]. Using (1)–(3), we obtain the quantum
efficiency of the ring PD as
where . Most of the interesting features of ring
PD occur near resonant wavelength where
and is an integer. In a coupled MRPD, the critical coupling
condition occurs when , that is, the input
power maximally enters microring waveguide. Fig. 2 shows
wavelength dependency of quantum efficiency in MRPD at crit-
ical coupling condition with periodic response characteristics.
In this figure, the “one-turn” efficiency, which is regarded as
, corresponds to maximum efficiency of a con-
ventional WGPD. The maximum value of quantum efficiency at
resonant wavelength is
For short cavity and very low loss structures, ap-
proaches 1, as shown in Fig. 3. Constructive interference at
resonance allows the field to turn inside the low loss microring
and provides the multipass or resonance absorption. As a
consequence, the effective absorption length is increased and
quantum efficiency is maximized. This feature is recognized
as internal power enhancement in resonant cavity [5]. The
periodic response can be evaluated with spectral resolution and
selectivity. The spectral resolution of MRPD is measured by
full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) at resonance, obtained as
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO. 15, AUGUST 1, 2006
= Fig. 3. Variation of  , finesse and FSR versus effective radius for MRPD.
(3)
Fig. 4. Optical model of MLPD.
(4)
where is light velocity. Also its spectral selectivity is quan-
, tified by finesse of resonator as , where
FSR is free-spectral range and is equal to . The , ,
FSR, and implicitly FWHM for low loss MRPD are depicted in
Fig. 3. Decreasing increases both the efficiency and spec-
tral selectivity and reducing mainly increases the spectral
resolution. Therefore, using these characteristic curves, one can
determine effect of design parameters and optimize device char-
acteristics. On the other hand, since the resonance wavelength
of MRPD depends to optical length one can electrically
or thermally tune it like a microring filter. For example, the
thermal shift of resonance wavelength is about 0.12 nm/K using
(5) K for InGaAsP [10].
Considering the resonance and waveguide behaviors of
MRPD, we distinguish it as an RCE-WGPD. In partially active
MRPD (PAMR-PD), one can use only a section of the microring
as the PD and the other section is used as the waveguide. Hence,
one can reduce the area of PD and thus increase its bandwidth.
B. Microloop PDs (MLPDs)
In addition to previous configuration, the RCE-WGPDs can
be designed based on a microloop structure. This type has a
simpler coupling structure. The optical model shown in Fig. 4
is proposed for MLPD, based on the microring optical model
shown in Fig. 1(b). In this model, in (1) is substituted with
and we obtain . Fig. 5 shows the quantum
(6)
efficiency of MLPD versus wavelength of input signal. Due to
ABAEIANI et al.: DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF RCE-WGPDs FOR MICROWAVE PHOTONICS APPLICATIONS
Fig. 5. Wavelength dependency for quantum efficiency of MLPD (R
5 m and n = 3:45).
feeding to microring, the quantum efficiency of MLPD is
higher than that of MRPD depicted in Fig. 2.
III. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
We have proposed new structures for high-efficiency, high-
speed, and wavelength-selective PDs. The optical models for
two types of these PDs, i.e., MRPDs and MLPDs, are presented
and the analytical expression for spectral response of microring
RCE-WGPDs is derived. While the conventional WGPD has
a broad spectral response, the RCE-WGPD provides a tunable
wavelength-selective response. In summary, the interference
coupling provides the wavelength selectivity and the multiple
pass absorption scheme provides a way for increasing the
efficiency at resonant wavelengths.
1599
These new resonant PDs, compared with conventional RCE-
PDs, have two main advantages: 1) no need for dielectric mir-
rors, thus they are easily fabricated by InP-based materials for
long wavelength application and 2) no standing wave effect, so
the design of active layer is made simpler. Also they can easily
work as in-line PDs and can be integrated in optoelectronics in-
tegrated devices and circuits.
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