Abstract
Reconfiguration of silicon photonic integrated circuits relying on the weak, volatile thermo-optic or electro-optic effect of silicon usually suffers from a large footprint and energy consumption. Here, integrating a phase-change material, Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) with silicon microring resonators, we demonstrate an energy-efficient, compact, non-volatile, reprogrammable platform. By adjusting the energy and number of free-space laser pulses applied to the GST, we characterize the strong broadband attenuation and optical phase modulation effects of the platform, and perform quasi-continuous tuning enabled by thermo-optically-induced phase changes. As a result, a non-volatile optical switch with a high extinction ratio, as large as 33 dB, is demonstrated.
Highlights
Silicon photonics has been extensively studied in the past decade for many applications including optical interconnects, sensing, and signal processing [1], due to its potential to realize high component density and reduced power consumption, and its compatibility with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication technology
While several devices based on the GST-SOI platform have already been reported [12,13,14], none of them have taken into account the pulse energy- or number-dependent optical response that has provided access to a desirable multilevel memory in silicon nitride photonics [22]
We verified the states by ellipsometry and X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurement of a blanket GST layer deposited on a silicon wafer
Summary
Silicon photonics has been extensively studied in the past decade for many applications including optical interconnects, sensing, and signal processing [1], due to its potential to realize high component density and reduced power consumption, and its compatibility with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication technology. “Optical switching at 1.55 μm in silicon racetrack resonators using phase change materials,” Appl. “Broadband nonvolatile photonic switching based on optical phase change materials: beyond the classical figure-of-merit,” Opt. Lett.
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