Resilience in optical ring-resonant switches

Phase-modulated ring resonant switches are receiving increasing attention for monolithic Silicon photonic networks. Resilience to fabrication variations and operational tolerances are however required to create networks with sufficient connectivity and bandwidth. In this work we use the combination of vectorial optical-mode propagation and transfer matrix calculation to map fabrication-level feature size variation to the optical switch performance metrics for extinction ratio, bandwidth and power penalty. Fabrication tolerances may be relaxed considerably through the combination of moderate size directional couplers of up to 30 µm, moderate 400 GHz free spectral range resonator design and the use of fifth order resonance. High speed 10 Gb/s, wavelength-multiplex-compliant, optical signal routing is predicted with on-state power penalties of 0.2 dB - 0.7 dB and off-state signal extinctions of - 62 dB.