Chen Kai, Duan Fei, Yu Yonglin
Opt Lett. 2019 Feb 15;44(4):951-954. doi: 10.1364/OL.44.000951.
We report a silicon thermo-optic Mach-Zehnder switch with a broadband, low switching power, and fast response. A broadband 3 dB directional coupler is used to act as a power splitter. Laterally supported suspended phase arms are employed to substantially reduce the switching power without sacrificing too much on the temporal response. Furthermore, two metallization steps are utilized to further decrease the power consumption. We experimentally obtain a switching power as low as 1.1 mW, as well as a fast response of 76 and 48 μs for rise time and fall time, respectively. The demonstrated device also has a relatively high mechanical strength and compact size, making it promising to be applied in silicon photonic integrated circuits.
我们报道了一种具有宽带、低开关功率和快速响应的硅热光马赫-曾德尔开关。一个宽带3dB定向耦合器用作功率分配器。采用横向支撑的悬空相位臂，在不牺牲太多时间响应的情况下大幅降低开关功率。此外，利用两个金属化步骤进一步降低功耗。我们通过实验获得了低至1.1mW的开关功率，以及分别为76μs和48μs的快速上升时间和下降时间响应。所展示的器件还具有相对较高的机械强度和紧凑的尺寸，使其有望应用于硅光子集成电路。
