GST-on-silicon hybrid nanophotonic integrated circuits: a non-volatile quasi-continuously reprogrammable platform

By Jiajiu Zheng, A. Khanolkar, Peipeng Xu, S. Colburn, S. Deshmukh, J. Myers, J. Frantz, Eric Pop, J. Hendrickson, J. Doylend and 2 more. 2018

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reconfiguration of silicon photonic integrated circuits relying on the weak, volatile thermo-optic or electro-optic effect of silicon usually suffers from a large footprint and energy consumption. Here, integrating a phase-change material, Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) with silicon microring resonators, we demonstrate an energy-efficient, compact, non-volatile, reprogrammable platform. By adjusting the energy and number of free-space laser pulses applied to the GST, we characterize the strong broadband attenuation and optical phase modulation effects of the platform, and perform quasi-continuous tuning enabled by thermo-optically-induced phase changes. As a result, a non-volatile optical switch with a high extinction ratio, as large as 33 dB, is demonstrated.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/624a21a4d9f8f6369b953dfcc7c2fb8a2dccf83a