High speed plasmonic modulator array enabling dense optical interconnect solutions

Abstract

Plasmonic modulators might pave the way for a new generation of compact low-power high-speed optoelectronic devices. We introduce an extremely compact transmitter based on plasmonic Mach-Zehnder modulators offering a capacity of 4 × 36 Gbit/s on a footprint that is only limited by the size of the high-speed contact pads. The transmitter array is contacted through a multicore fiber with a channel spacing of 50 μm.

Silicon Nitride Photonics for the Near-Infrared

“…Although silicon nitride is a flexible material [57], [58], it exhibits different challenges that need to be addressed such as its lack modulation mechanism. This situation has driven interest in hybrid silicon photonic devices in which optical functionality is provided by a secondary material, such as 2D materials [59], liquid crystals [60], metals [61], electrooptic polymers [62] [63], germanium [64], and optical phase change materials [PCMs] [65]- [67]. This section presents the large scale integration of novel materials on SiN devices including experimental work integrating O-PCMs for a variety of functionalities.…”

Harnessing nonlinearities near material absorption resonances for reducing losses in plasmonic modulators

“…Short phase shifters (5 μm) display low optical losses, but require relatively high U π voltages of 10 V causing an electrical energy consumption of 25 fJ/bit [31]. Contrarily, long phase shifters (>10 μm) enable reduced U π voltages at the cost of higher modulator losses [44][45][46]. A way to reduce the driving voltage without suffering from higher losses is to make use of material resonances given by the OEO-material and by gold.…”

“…This configuration allows to achieve a π−phase shift between both arms of the modulator by applying a U π on one arm and a -U π on the other arm in modulator with half the length. Lossvoltage-length products of 25 dBV (12.5 dBV) can then be reached for a simple phase shifter (push-pull Mach-Zehnder Modulator [24,31,43,44,46]). This means POH Mach-Zehnder modulators of 4μm length can be switched from on-state to off-state by a driving voltage of ± 1.5 V with insertion losses of 4 dB only.…”

Design Investigation of 4 × 4 Nonblocking Hybrid Plasmonic Electrooptic Switch

“…To take full advantage of this fabrication process, the lateral sizes of the optical and photonic devices should be scaled down to nanometers to be comparable with the process' electronic-scale standard. This can be achieved by using plasmonic technology, which enables the fabrication of these devices with a subwavelength scale, while the diffraction limit is overcome by confinement of light waves at the metal-dielectric interface [22][23][24]. Different structures of lasers [25], waveguides [26], photodetectors [27][28][29], optical modulators [30,31], and optical switches [32,33] have been implemented in different material systems using plasmonic technology.…”