On-chip Electrothermal Switching of Low-loss Phase Change Materials for Nonvolatile Programmable Photonic Circuits

Abstract

The quest for efficient programmable photonic circuits requires active optical components with low insertion loss, small form factor, and low electrical power consumption [1] . The most common low-loss phase shifter – the key building block – employs electrically driven heaters to exploit thermo-optic effects. However, these devices require a constant power supply, suffer from thermal crosstalk, and their sizes are typically >100 µm. Here, we demonstrate a novel alternative that meets all the aforementioned requirements. We use silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguides with patterned n ++ - n - n ++ doped-silicon microheaters to electrothermally switch, with a single pulse, a cell of Sb 2 Se 3 between its two optically distinct, nonvolatile states: amorphous and crystalline. Sb 2 Se 3 is a phase change material (PCM) that offers a ∆n ≈ 0.77 upon switching between states with vanishingly small losses at 1550nm [2] . This unique set of properties allows for phase-only modulation [3] , which sets a precedent in a growing PCM photonics field familiar with PCMs for amplitude modulation at the telecom band [4] .