Hybrid-plasmonic three-terminal travelling-wave modulator with dynamic reconfigurability

Charles Lin; Amr S. Helmy

doi:10.1117/12.2213221

1 March 2016 Hybrid-plasmonic three-terminal travelling-wave modulator with dynamic reconfigurability

Charles Lin, Amr S. Helmy

Proceedings Volume 9750, Integrated Optics: Devices, Materials, and Technologies XX; 97500D (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2213221
Event: SPIE OPTO, 2016, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

The trade-off between extinction ratio (ER), insertion loss (IL), and energy consumption (E) is a common bottleneck for existing integrated optical modulators. In this work, we report an indium tin oxide (ITO) based hybrid-plasmonic modulator, consisting of a Si/ITO/HfO₂/Al/HfO₂/ITO/Si stack, that can alleviate such trade- off in device metrics. This is achieved by first use field symmetry matching technique to engineer the waveguide to support long-range propagation. Then, by electrostatically inducing the ITO layers to enter an epsilon-near-zero state, strong carrier absorption as well as disturbance to the field symmetry will render the otherwise low-loss waveguide highly absorptive. Using this strategy, amplitude modulation with ER = 4.83 dB/μm, IL = 0.03 dB/μm, and E = 14.8 fJ is achieved. Moreover, with a triode-like biasing scheme, the modulator attributes can be further manipulated and the same device can be dynamically reconfigured for phase and 4-quadrature-amplitude modulation, with actively device length of only 5.53 μm and 17.78 μm respectively.

Citation Download Citation

Charles Lin and Amr S. Helmy "Hybrid-plasmonic three-terminal travelling-wave modulator with dynamic reconfigurability", Proc. SPIE 9750, Integrated Optics: Devices, Materials, and Technologies XX, 97500D (1 March 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2213221

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