Abstract
We implemented a hydrogen annealing based post-processing technique as a tool to improve the sidewall roughness of 3 μm thick silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguides and demonstrated ultra-high-Q factors on racetrack resonators leveraging on the propagation loss reduction achieved through the smoothing process. The designed racetracks are based on a combination of rib waveguides and strip-waveguide-based Euler bends. We measured intrinsic quality factors of 14 × 106 for a racetrack with a footprint of ∼5.5 mm2 and 10.7 × 106 for a smaller racetrack with footprint of ∼1.48 mm2. The estimated propagation loss for the rib waveguides was ∼2.7 dB/m, representing a ×3 reduction respect to the previously measured losses of 3 μm thick SOI rib waveguides treated with thermal oxidation smoothing. Overall, the post-processing technique allowed to significantly reduce the sidewall roughness without altering the geometry of the waveguides, unlike in sub-micron scale SOI platforms, making it an attractive solution for applications demanding ultra-low losses.
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