Nonvolatile electrically reconfigurable integrated photonic switch

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel nonvolatile, electrically reconfigurable photonic switch using phase-change materials, enabling compact, energy-efficient, and CMOS-compatible photonic circuits for advanced applications.

Contribution

It introduces a new design of photonic switches with phase-change materials that are nonvolatile, scalable, and compatible with existing CMOS fabrication processes.

Findings

Achieved reversible switching with high endurance.

Demonstrated near-zero additional loss in switches.

Enabled large-scale programmable photonic processing.

Abstract

Reconfigurability of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) has become increasingly important due to the growing demands for electronic-photonic systems on a chip driven by emerging applications, including neuromorphic computing, quantum information, and microwave photonics. Success in these fields usually requires highly scalable photonic switching units as essential building blocks. Current photonic switches, however, mainly rely on materials with weak, volatile thermo-optic or electro-optic modulation effects, resulting in a large footprint and high energy consumption. As a promising alternative, chalcogenide phase-change materials (PCMs) exhibit strong modulation in a static, self-holding fashion. Here, we demonstrate nonvolatile electrically reconfigurable photonic switches using PCM-clad silicon waveguides and microring resonators that are intrinsically compact and energy-efficient. With phase transitions actuated by in-situ silicon PIN heaters, near-zero additional loss and reversible switching with high endurance are obtained in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible process. Our work can potentially enable very large-scale general-purpose programmable integrated photonic processors.