On-chip switching of a silicon nitride micro-ring resonator based on digital microfluidics platform

We demonstrate the switching of a silicon nitride micro ring resonator (MRR) by using digital microfluidics (DMF). Our platform allows driving micro-droplets on-chip, providing control over the effective refractive index at the vicinity of the resonator and thus facilitating the manipulation of the transmission spectrum of the MRR. The device is fabricated using a process that is compatible with high-throughput silicon fabrication techniques with buried highly doped silicon electrodes. This platform can be extended towards controlling arrays of micro optical devices using minute amounts of liquid droplets. Such an integration of DMF and optical resonators on chip can be used in variety of applications, ranging from biosensing and kinetics to tunable filtering on chip.