Silicon-Organic Hybrid (SOH) and Plasmonic-Organic Hybrid (POH) Integration

Abstract

Abstract-Silicon photonics offers tremendous potential for inexpensive high-yield photonic-electronic integration. Besides conventional dielectric waveguides, plasmonic structures can also be efficiently realized on the silicon photonic platform, reducing device footprint by more than an order of magnitude. However, neither silicon nor metals exhibit appreciable second-order optical nonlinearities, thereby making efficient electro-optic modulators challenging to realize. These deficiencies can be overcome by the concepts of silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) and plasmonicorganic hybrid (POH) integration, which combine silicon-oninsulator (SOI) waveguides and plasmonic nanostructures with organic electro-optic cladding materials.Index Terms-Electro-optic modulators, photonic integrated circuits, silicon photonics, plasmonics, nonlinear optical devicesElectro-optic (EO) modulators are key building blocks for highly integrated photonic-electronic circuits on the silicon

Material platforms for integrated quantum photonics

“…Such media range from organic electro-optic materials [186,187] and lithium niobate [169,188] (see Figure 6c) to III-V semiconductors [189] and ferroelectric perovskites [190]. Such integration potentially offers gigahertz electronic modulation bandwidth.…”

Generation of 64 GBd 4ASK signals using a silicon-organic hybrid modulator at 80°C

“…Silicon-organic hybrid modulators rely on the interaction of the light guided by an SOI waveguide with an EO cladding material which is exposed to an externally applied electric field [13]. Figure 1(a) shows a schematic (top) and a cross section of the SOH Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM): Standard SOI strip waveguides form the interferometer together with multimode interference couplers (MMI) operating as amplitude splitter and combiner.…”

“…Higher line rates of up to 180 Gbit/s per polarization have been achieved by using more complex modulation formats such as 64QAM at symbol rates of 30 GBd [9], or by using electrical OFDM [10], but these implementations need extensive and power-hungry pre-and post-processing in the electrical domain to compensate for the impairments caused by the modulators' amplitude-phase coupling. The limitations of conventional all-silicon modulators can be overcome by silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) integration, which exploits organic electro-optic (EO) materials in combination with conventional SOI slot waveguides to realize pure phase modulators that do not suffer from amplitude-phase coupling [11][12][13]. With this approach, devices with significantly reduced voltage-length products of only U π L = 0.5 Vmm have been demonstrated, enabling modulation at record-low energy consumption of only 1.6 fJ/bit [14,15].…”

Integrated optical frequency shifter in silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) technology

“…To avoid amplitude-phase coupling in the silicon-based modulators, the phase shifter sections are realized by silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) integration [16]. A cross section of an SOH MZM is depicted in Fig.…”

“…We exploit the silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) integration concept to realize broadband phase shifters that feature low drive voltages and enable pure phase modulation. SOH integration permits the combination of conventional silicon-oninsulator (SOI) waveguides with a wide variety of organic cladding materials and has been used to realize efficient high-speed electro-optic modulators [16][17][18], ultra-compact phase shifters [19,20], as well as lasers [21]. Interaction of the guided light with the organic cladding of the SOH device can be enhanced by using thin ultra-thin strip [22] or slot waveguides [23], which can be combined with photonic crystal structures [24,25] or ring resonators [26].…”