Nonvolatile silicon photonic 1×2 switch by integrating the phase change chalcogenide into microring network

Abstract

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) as potential candidate to overcome the “von Neumann bottleneck” of current electronic technologies beyond Moore’s law gain increasing applications in fields of optical communication, data exchange and highperformance interconnect networks etc. Currently, elementary active devices such as photonic switches and modulators play essential roles in light-flow control of optical interconnection network, but suffer from high static power consumption because of volatile control and large footprint that is hard to integrate. In this trend, optical phase change materials (OPCMs) based active devices emerge as promising solutions due to advantages of large optical contrast between the amorphous and crystalline states, optically or electrically switchable and non-volatile control, easy to integration etc. In this paper, we propose a non-volatile O-PCMs photonic switch by integrating a thin film of germanium antimony telluride (GST) alloy on top of a micro-ring resonator. As confirmed by our analytical and computational results, upon an amorphous-to-crystalline phase change, two output ports of the O-PCM microring switch exhibit gigantic transmission contrast with a ratio up to highest 47:1. Further, the O-PCM based photonic switch also demonstrates extremely low extinction ration to 13.58 dB and 14.40 dB for both output ports from 1.5 μm to 1.6 μm.