Active polarization controller based on micro-ring resonators

On-chip polarization handling is of great significance for optical interconnects to overcome polarization sensitivity. In this Letter, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel, to the best of our knowledge, on-chip polarization controller (PC) on a 220 nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. It is the first demonstration of a PC based on micro-ring resonators. Any input polarization states can be actively converted to the standard transverse-electric (TE) mode under the phase manipulation. Experimental results show that the insertion loss is less than 0.8 dB and the polarization dependent loss (PDL) is around 0.5 dB. The proposed device also exhibits excellent performances in wavelength tunability over the C band and 35 Gbps data transmission.