Design Investigation of 2 × 2 Mach–Zehnder Optical Switch Based on a Metal–Polymer–Silicon Hybrid Plasmonic Waveguide

Design Investigation of 4 × 4 Nonblocking Hybrid Plasmonic Electrooptic Switch

“…The 2 × 2 MZS used in our proposed switch consumes 9.9 fJ/bit according to the investigation reported in Ref. [41]. Assuming a 100 Gbps operation, the proposed switch consumes 3 × 9.9 × 10 −5 × 100 × 10 9 3 mW.…”

“…Although the design is used based on a 2 × 2 plasmonic switch (reported in Ref. [41]), the paper simulates the performance of the proposed 4 × 4 switch as a single element using a COMSOL environment. Coupling of the input/output interfaces between successive 2 × 2 switches are addressed carefully to achieve low-loss coupling.…”

“…A miniaturized 2 × 2 electro-optic plasmonic MZS has been designed based on a metal-polymer-silicon hybrid waveguide, as shown in Figure 1. The design issues of this switch have been reported in our previous work [41] and only a summary of switch performance characteristics is given here. Adiabatic tapers are designed carefully to efficiently couple the light between the plasmonic phase shifter, implemented in each of the MZS arms, and the 3-dB input/output DCs.…”

“…Another main challenge is designing the MZ input and output directional couplers (DCs) to achieve highly efficient coupling between the photonic mode and plasmonic mode (input coupler) and vice versa (output coupler). These issues have been addressed carefully in our recent work [41], where a 2 × 2 electro-optic MZS was designed on a silicon photonic platform using hybrid plasmonic waveguide embedded with JRD1 polymer (r 33 = 390 pm/V) to form the two MZ arms. The DC is optimized for low-loss and high-coupling efficient between the photonic mode and plasmonic mode.…”

“…This paper presents the design and performance evaluation of a nonblockig 4 × 4 plasmonic switch for 1550 nm and C-band optical communications. The switch uses a 2 × 2 hybrid plasmonic MZS as a building block [41] where JRD1 polymer is used as a highly EO-coefficient material in the two MZ phase shifter arms. Different from the hybrid plasmonic waveguides (HPWs), the propagation mode in the metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguide has the maximum value of the electric field at the interface between the insulator and the metal.…”