Optimization of metallic microheaters for high-speed reconfigurable silicon photonics

Abstract

The strong thermooptic effect in silicon enables low-power and low-loss reconfiguration of large-scale silicon photonics. Thermal reconfiguration through the integration of metallic microheaters has been one of the more widely used reconfiguration techniques in silicon photonics. In this paper, structural and material optimizations are carried out through heat transport modeling to improve the reconfiguration speed of such devices, and the results are experimentally verified. Around 4 micros reconfiguration time are shown for the optimized structures. Moreover, sub-microsecond reconfiguration time is experimentally demonstrated through the pulsed excitation of the microheaters. The limitation of this pulsed excitation scheme is also discussed through an accurate system-level model developed for the microheater response.

Reconfigurable silicon thermo-optical ring resonator switch based on Vernier effect control

“…In order to gain general understanding regarding the thermal behavior of our structure, we simulated its thermal behavior by means of simple 2D-Finite Elements method, similar to the work performed by Atabaki [20]. Normalized thermal mode profiles are shown in Fig.…”

High-Speed, Phase-Dominant Spatial Light Modulation with Silicon-Based Active Resonant Antennas

“…polycrystalline silicon or GaAs/AlGaAs-based DBR) or thinning the DBR layers should greatly improve the response time. 23 As a point of reference, sub-microseconds response was reported by means of direct heating of silicon waveguides in the context of an on-chip Mach-Zehnder interferometer, where the buried oxide layer in a silicon-on-insulator substrate was 1 µm. 24 Even further improvement of the modulation speed up to hundreds of MHz can be expected by deploying the same device design but with a p-i-n diode structure along the silicon bars and using the plasma dispersion effect [25][26][27] or the Kerr effect.…”

Experimental demonstration of a reconfigurable silicon thermo-optical device based on spectral tuning of ring resonators for optical signal processing

“…The electrical power was set to 300 μW. Our micro-heaters were experimentally optimized to provide high resonant shift; however, it is worthy pointing out that there is enough room for further optimization regarding power efficiency and switching speed, as previously demonstrated by other authors [26][27][28][29].…”