High speed and low power consumption modulator based on electro-optic polymer infiltrated subwavelength grating waveguide ring resonator (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

Silicon-based high-speed optical modulators, fabricated using CMOS compatible nanofabrication technology, are the key components for integrated photonics, especially the high-speed intra- and inter-chip optical interconnects. In this paper, we propose a high speed, low power consumption electro-optic (EO) modulator based on the EO polymer/silicon hybrid subwavelength grating (SWG) waveguide ring resonator. The core of the SWG waveguide consists periodically arranged silicon pillars along the light propagation direction. EO polymer (SEO125) is used as the top cladding. An intriguing advantage that the SWG waveguide has over the conventional silicon strip waveguide is its large mode volume overlap with EO polymer. Besides, compared with the plasma dispersion effect, electro-optic polymers have a large electro-optic coefficient and ultrafast response speed. Furthermore, among the different modulator structures, ring resonator is one of the most promising structures as it has a small footprint which is the key for VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration), and it allows complex optical functionalities monolithically integrated with advanced electronics at a competitive cost. Thus, the proposed EO polymer infiltrated SWG waveguide ring resonator based modulator is a very promising candidate for low cost, small size, light weight, and low power consumption (CSWaP) optical interconnect.