Silicon Integrated Interferometric Optical Gyroscope

Miniaturized and low-cost optical gyroscopes are urgently required for emerging applications in consumer electronics market. In this paper, we proposed a theoretical analysis and preliminary experiment results for integrated interferometric optical gyroscope based on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform for the first time. The gyroscope is based on the Sagnac effect and composed of coiled multimode waveguides to reduce propagation loss and the footprint. The sensitivity of the sensing part is fully investigated in terms of waveguide loss, gyroscope footprint, crossing numbers for coiled waveguides, as well as the waveguide cross section. The experimental results show that gyroscope sensitivity is 51.3 deg/s with a footprint of 600 μm × 700 μm.