Hybrid silicon-conductive oxide-plasmonic electro-absorption modulator with 2-V swing voltage

Qian Gao; Erwen Li; Bokun Zhou; Alan X. Wang

doi:10.1117/1.JNP.13.036005

13 July 2019 Hybrid silicon-conductive oxide-plasmonic electro-absorption modulator with 2-V swing voltage

Qian Gao, Erwen Li, Bokun Zhou, Alan X. Wang

Author Affiliations +

Journal of Nanophotonics, Vol. 13, Issue 3, 036005 (July 2019). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JNP.13.036005

Abstract

Transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) have emerged as materials for nanoscale electro-optic modulators. The free-carrier-induced epsilon-near-zero effect by applying a gate voltage is capable of achieving ultra-strong electro-absorption (EA) effect. As the EA rate has been theoretically proved to be dependent on the mobility of the TCO gate, we experimentally demonstrated a hybrid silicon-plasmonic EA modulator using high-mobility In₂O₃ as the gate. With an ultra-compact active region of only 5-μm long, we achieved a small voltage swing V_pp of only 2 V to obtain an EA rate of 1.2 dB / μm, resulting in very high energy efficiency of 110 femto-joule/bit. We also experimentally proved the correlation between the EA rate and the mobility of TCO materials through comparison with indium-tin-oxide gated modulators. In addition, the hybrid EA modulator is capable of covering more than 100-nm optical bandwidth in the telecommunication wavelength window, which is limited by the bandwidth of the grating coupler.

Citation Download Citation

Qian Gao, Erwen Li, Bokun Zhou, and Alan X. Wang "Hybrid silicon-conductive oxide-plasmonic electro-absorption modulator with 2-V swing voltage," Journal of Nanophotonics 13(3), 036005 (13 July 2019). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JNP.13.036005

Received: 11 March 2019; Accepted: 2 July 2019; Published: 13 July 2019

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