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High-Q Si ring resonators play an important role in the development of widely tunable heterogeneously integrated lasers. However, while a high Q-factor (Q > 1 million) is important for ring resonators in a laser cavity, the parasitic high-power density in a Si resonator can deteriorate the laser performance at high power levels due to nonlinear loss. Here, we experimentally show that this detrimental effect can happen at moderate power levels (a few milliwatts) where typical heterogeneously integrated lasers work. We further compare different ring resonators, including extended Si ring resonators and Si3N4 ring resonators and provide practical approaches to minimize this effect. Our results provide explanations and guidelines for high-Q ring resonator designs in heterogeneously integrated tunable lasers, and they are also applicable for hybrid integrated butt-coupled lasers.

Typical integrated optical phase tuners alter the effective index. In this paper, we explore tuning by geometric deformation. We show that tuning efficiency, Vπ L, improves as the device size shrinks down to the optimal bend radius, contrary to conventional index-shift based approaches where Vπ L remains constant. We demonstrate that this approach is capable of ultra-low power tuning across a full FSR in a low-confinement silicon nitride based ring resonator of 580 μm radius. We demonstrate record performance with VFSR = 16 V, Vπ L = 3.6 V dB, Vπ Lα = 1.1 V dB, tuning current below 10 nA, and unattenuated tuning response up to 1 MHz. We also present optimized designs for high confinement silicon nitride and silicon based platforms with radius down to 80 μm and 45 μm, respectively, with performance well beyond current state-of-the-art. Applications include narrow-linewidth tunable diode lasers for spectroscopy and non-linear optics, optical phased array beamforming networks for RF antennas and LIDAR, and optical filters for WDM telecommunication links.