Fabrication and characterization of suspended SiO_2 ridge optical waveguides and the devices

Novel suspended SiO(2) ridge optical waveguides on silicon are fabricated and characterized. The present suspended SiO(2) ridge optical waveguide has a SiO(2) ridge core surrounded by air. The propagation loss and the bend loss measured are about 0.385dB/cm and 0.037dB/90° respectively for the fabricated 1 μm-wide waveguides with a bending radius of 100 μm when operating at the wavelength of 1550 nm. With the present suspended SiO(2) optical waveguides, a small racetrack resonator with a radius of 100 μm is also demonstrated and the measured Q-factor is about 3160.