Nonvolatile Electrically Reconfigurable Integrated Photonic Switch Enabled by a Silicon PIN Diode Heater
Abstract
Reconfigurability of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) has become increasingly important due to the growing demands for electronic–photonic systems on a chip driven by emerging applications, including neuromorphic computing, quantum information, and microwave photonics. Success in these fields usually requires highly scalable photonic switching units as essential building blocks. Current photonic switches, however, mainly rely on materials with weak, volatile thermo‐optic or electro‐optic modulation effects, resulting in large footprints and high energy consumption. As a promising alternative, chalcogenide phase‐change materials (PCMs) exhibit strong optical modulation in a static, self‐holding fashion, but the scalability of present PCM‐integrated photonic applications is still limited by the poor optical or electrical actuation approaches. Here, with phase transitions actuated by in situ silicon PIN diode heaters, scalable nonvolatile electrically reconfigurable photonic switches using PCM‐clad silicon waveguides and microring resonators are demonstrated. As a result, intrinsically compact and energy‐efficient switching units operated with low driving voltages, near‐zero additional loss, and reversible switching with high endurance are obtained in a complementary metal‐oxide‐semiconductor (CMOS)‐compatible process. This work can potentially enable very large‐scale CMOS‐integrated programmable electronic–photonic systems such as optical neural networks and general‐purpose integrated photonic processors.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jun 26, 2020
- Source ID
- 10.1002/adma.202001218
Entities
People
- Arka Majumdar
- Changming Wu
- Eric Pop
- Jiajiu Zheng
- Jonathan K. Doylend
- Mo Li
- Peipeng Xu
- Sanchit Deshmukh
- Scott Dunham
- Shifeng Zhu
- Zhuoran Fang
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Intel Corporation
- National Institutes of Health
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- National Science Foundation
- Ningbo University
- Semiconductor Research Corporation
- Stanford University
- University of Washington
- Washington Research Foundation