Design of a Miniaturized Broadband Silicon Hybrid Plasmonic Temporal Integrator for Ultrafast Optical Signal Processing

Abstract

A fractional-order silicon hybrid plasmonic temporal integrator with considerably wide full-width at half- maximum (FWHM) bandwidth of ∼1 THz, higher than the previously reported photonic temporal integrators, and noticeably compact footprint of ∼5 μm × 3 μm is proposed. The presented plasmonic temporal integrator is implemented based on a double-ring add-drop resonator structure with ring radii of 1.5 μm. The 3-D finite-difference time-domain (3D-FDTD) simulation results show that the fractional-order of the integrator is 0.64 and it is capable of processing the ultrashort pulses with the duration of 450 fs. The integration time window is estimated as 520 fs, while the achieved energy efficiency is as high as −1.92 dB. The compact size and wide bandwidth of the proposed integrator makes it suitable for ultrafast optical signal processing applications. As an example, the functionality of the designed integrator for solving ordinary differential equations (ODEs) is investigated.