Thermally enhanced responsivity in an all-silicon optical power monitor based on defect-mediated absorption

Abstract

We demonstrate a high responsivity all-silicon in-line optical power monitor by using the thermal effect to enhance the quantum efficiency of defect-mediated absorption at 1550 nm. The doping compensation technique is utilized to increase the density of lattice defects responsible for the sub-bandgap absorption and suppress the detrimental free carrier absorption. The 200-μm-long device presents a propagation loss as low as 2.9 dB/cm. Its responsivity is enhanced from 12.1 mA/W to 112 mA/W at − 9 V bias by heating the optical absorption region. With this device, we build an optical power monitoring system that operates in the sampling mode. The minimal detectable optical power of the system is below − 22.8 dBm , while the average power consumption is less than 1 mW at a sampling frequency of 10 Hz. Advantages of this scheme in terms of high responsivity, low insertion loss, and low power consumption lend itself to implement the feedback control of advanced large-scale silicon photonic integrated circuits.