Compact atto-joule-per-bit bus-coupled photonic crystal nanobeam switches

Jianhao Shen; Daniel Donnelly; Swapnajit Chakravarty

doi:10.1117/12.2649250

17 March 2023 Compact atto-joule-per-bit bus-coupled photonic crystal nanobeam switches

Jianhao Shen, Daniel Donnelly, Swapnajit Chakravarty

Proceedings Volume 12424, Integrated Optics: Devices, Materials, and Technologies XXVII; 1242412 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2649250
Event: SPIE OPTO, 2023, San Francisco, California, United States

Conference Poster

Abstract

The benefits of photonics over electronics in the application of optical transceivers and both classical and quantum computing have been demonstrated over the past decades, especially in the ability to achieve high bandwidth, high interconnectivity, and low latency. Due to the high maturity of silicon photonics foundries, research on photonics devices such as silicon micro ring resonators (MRRs), Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM), and photonic crystal (PC) resonators has attracted plenty of attention. Among these photonic devices, silicon MRRs using carrier depletion effects in p-n junctions represent optical switches manufacturable in the most compact magnitude at high volume with demonstrated switching energies ~5.2fJ/bit. In matrix multiplication demonstrated with integrated photonics, one approach is to couple one bus straight waveguide to several MRRs with different resonant wavelengths to transport signals in different channels, corresponding to a matrix row or column. However, such architectures are potentially limited to ~30 MRRs in series, by the limited free-spectral range (FSR) of an individual MRR. We show that PC switches with sub-micron optical mode confinements can have a FSR <300nm, which can potentially enable energy efficient computing with larger matrices of ~200 resonators by multiplexing. In this paper, we present designs for an oxide-clad bus-coupled PC switch with 1dB insertion loss, 5dB extinction, and ~260aJ/bit switching energy by careful control of the cavity geometry as well as p-n junction doping. We also demonstrate that air-clad bus-coupled PC switches can operate with 1dB insertion loss, 3dB extinction, and ~80aJ/bit switching energy.

Citation Download Citation

Jianhao Shen, Daniel Donnelly, and Swapnajit Chakravarty "Compact atto-joule-per-bit bus-coupled photonic crystal nanobeam switches", Proc. SPIE 12424, Integrated Optics: Devices, Materials, and Technologies XXVII, 1242412 (17 March 2023); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2649250

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