Low power compact hybrid plasmonic double microring electro-optical modulator

Abstract

In this work, we present an electro-optical modulator based on electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). Our modulator employs a conductor-gap-silicon (CGS) microring resonator on each side of the input waveguide in a pushpull configuration utilizing an embedded electro-optical polymer (EOP). CGS waveguides support hybrid plasmonic modes offering a sound trade-off between mode confinement and propagation loss. The modulator is designed and analyzed using 3D finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulations. To have a high quality resonator, the rings are designed to have moderate waveguide propagation losses and a sub-micron radius of R = 805 nm. With an exact capacitance of just 1.06 fF per single microring resonator and applied voltage of 2 V, the exact energy consumption is estimated to be 4.24 fJ/bit. To the best of our knowledge, this figure represents 40% less power consumption in comparison with different modulators structures. The ultra-small capacitance of the proposed modulator and the instantaneous response of the used polymer make our design suitable for high bit rate applications. At the wavelength of -1550 nm-, the insertion loss is 0.34 dB and the extinction ratio is 10.23 dB.