Ultra-thin silicon/electro-optic polymer hybrid waveguide modulators
- Institute for Materials Chemistry and Engineering, Kyushu University, 6-1 Kasuga-koen Kasuga, Fukuoka 816-8580 (Japan)
- Department of Molecular and Material Sciences, Kyushu University, 6-1 Kasuga-koen Kasuga, Fukuoka 816-8580 (Japan)
- Nissan Chemical Industries, Ltd., 2-10-1 Tuboi Nishi, Funabashi, Chiba 274-8507 (Japan)
- National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 588-2 Iwaoka, Nishi-ku, Kobe 651-2492 (Japan)
Ultra-thin silicon and electro-optic (EO) polymer hybrid waveguide modulators have been designed and fabricated. The waveguide consists of a silicon core with a thickness of 30 nm and a width of 2 μm. The cladding is an EO polymer. Optical mode calculation reveals that 55% of the optical field around the silicon extends into the EO polymer in the TE mode. A Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) modulator was prepared using common coplanar electrodes. The measured half-wave voltage of the MZI with 7 μm spacing and 1.3 cm long electrodes is 4.6 V at 1550 nm. The evaluated EO coefficient is 70 pm/V, which is comparable to that of the bulk EO polymer film. Using ultra-thin silicon is beneficial in order to reduce the side-wall scattering loss, yielding a propagation loss of 4.0 dB/cm. We also investigated a mode converter which couples light from the hybrid EO waveguide into a strip silicon waveguide. The calculation indicates that the coupling loss between these two devices is small enough to exploit the potential fusion of a hybrid EO polymer modulator together with a silicon micro-photonics device.
- OSTI ID:
- 22482147
- Journal Information:
- Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 107, Issue 12; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0003-6951
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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