Abstract
Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is an interesting material for hybrid photonic integrated devices due to its insulator–metal phase transition. Utilizing the hysteresis of the phase transition in voltage-biased VO2, we demonstrate a compact hybrid VO2–silicon optical memory element integrated into a silicon waveguide. An optical pulse writes the VO2 memory, leading to an optical attenuation that can be read out by the optical transmission in a silicon waveguide. Our on-chip memory cell can be optically written with energy as low as 23.5 pJ per pulse and with a 10–90% rise time of ∼100 ns. This approach is promising for optical data storage in silicon photonic integrated circuits.
Highlights
Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is an interesting material for hybrid photonic integrated devices due to its insulator−metal phase transition
Integrated optical memories are gaining significant momentum to improve the performance of computing architectures by leveraging the speed and energy advantages of light.[1−4] silicon (Si) photonics has emerged as a leading integrated platform for information transfer, its relatively modest range of optical properties has driven interest into hybrid silicon photonic platforms where additional optical functionalities are fulfilled by a secondary material, such as a III−V compound semiconductor, two-dimensional material, optical phase-change material (O-PCM), and so on
The VO2 device exhibited a hysteresis with bistable states, which we utilized for the optical memory
Summary
Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is an interesting material for hybrid photonic integrated devices due to its insulator−metal phase transition. The written memory is read out as a change in the optical transmission and the electrical current caused by the state of VO2.
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