Abstract
Phase-change materials (PCMs) are important photonic materials that have the advantages of a rapid and reversible phase change, a great difference in the optical properties between the crystalline and amorphous states, scalability, and nonvolatility. With the constant development in the PCM platform and integration of multiple material platforms, more and more reconfigurable photonic devices and their dynamic regulation have been theoretically proposed and experimentally demonstrated, showing the great potential of PCMs in integrated photonic chips. Here, we review the recent developments in PCMs and discuss their potential for photonic devices. A universal overview of the mechanism of the phase transition and models of PCMs is presented. PCMs have injected new life into on-chip photonic integrated circuits, which generally contain an optical switch, an optical logical gate, and an optical modulator. Photonic neural networks based on PCMs are another interesting application of PCMs. Finally, the future development prospects and problems that need to be solved are discussed. PCMs are likely to have wide applications in future intelligent photonic systems.
Highlights
Published: 10 May 2021Photonic devices and applications have attracted much attention over the last two decades owing to their unique advantages
The advantages of photonic devices are their ultrafast information-processing speed owing to the propagation speed of light, very large information capacity because of light’s abundant degrees of freedom, and ability to achieve parallel computing and device interconnection owing to no ohmic loss and Coulomb’s law
Tremendous progress has recently been made in photonic integrated circuits (PICs), which have the striking advantages of small footprints, low power consumption, ultrahigh information-processing speed, and wide frequency bandwidth
Summary
Published: 10 May 2021Photonic devices and applications have attracted much attention over the last two decades owing to their unique advantages. The advantages of photonic devices are their ultrafast information-processing speed owing to the propagation speed of light, very large information capacity because of light’s abundant degrees of freedom, and ability to achieve parallel computing and device interconnection owing to no ohmic loss and Coulomb’s law. Tremendous progress has recently been made in photonic integrated circuits (PICs), which have the striking advantages of small footprints, low power consumption, ultrahigh information-processing speed, and wide frequency bandwidth. PICs provide a scalable hardware platform to solve the contradiction between the rate of energy efficiency improvement and the rapidly increasing computational load [1]. There are multiple material platforms to achieve PICs. The silicon-on-insulator platform fabrication infrastructure is compatible with complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology, and it can significantly reduce production costs.
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