The design and analysis of a CMOS-compatible silicon photonic ON-OFF switch based on a mode-coupling mechanism

摘要

A directional-coupler-based 1 × 1 silicon-on-insulator photonic ON-OFF switch with a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible driving voltage is proposed in this paper. The directional coupling of the switch is accomplished by a carrier injection method with the help of a P-i-N diode phase shifter. The advantage of using the directional coupler as a switch is its smaller layout requirement, which makes it more suitable for use in integrated photonic applications. The ON-OFF switch has potential applications in programmable photonic switch fabrics, where the OFF-state behavior is used to prevent the input from being propagated to the output. The proposed switch offers a wide range of cross power-coupling coefficient (κ~2) values, ranging from 0 to 0.3 for the ON-state and from 0.79 to 1 for the OFF-state. The finite-difference beam propagation and two-dimensional (2D) finite-difference time-domain methods are used for photonic simulations. The results are compared analytically using the coupled mode theory with the help of the MATLAB software package.