Electro-optical silicon isolator

TL;DR

This paper reports the development of a CMOS-compatible, non-magnetic silicon optical isolator that uses electrically-driven refractive index modulation to achieve non-reciprocal light transmission with high contrast, suitable for integrated photonics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel electrically-induced non-reciprocal silicon optical isolator based on indirect interband photonic transition, compatible with standard CMOS fabrication.

Findings

Achieved a contrast ratio exceeding 30dB in simulations.

Experimentally observed a 3dB contrast in continuous-wave operation.

Device performance is linear and unaffected by signal timing, format, amplitude, or phase.

Abstract

We create a non-magnetic CMOS-compatible optical isolator on a silicon chip. The isolator is based on indirect interband photonic transition, induced by electrically-driven dynamic refractive index modulation. We demonstrate an electrically-induced non-reciprocity: the transmission coefficients between two single-mode waveguides become dependent on the propagation directions only in the presence of the electrical drive. The contrast ratio between forward and backward directions exceeds 30dB in simulations. We experimentally observe a strong contrast (up to 3 dB) limited only by our electrical setup, for a continuous-wave (CW) optical signal. Importantly, the device is linear with respect to signal light. The observed contrast ratio is independent of the timing, the format, the amplitude and the phase of the input signal.