Nonvolatile Integrated Phase-change Photonic Platform for Programmable Photonics

Book excerpt: With the slowing down of Moore's law and advances in nanophotonics, photonic information processing by photonic integrated circuits (PICs) has raised considerable interest to compete with electronic systems in energy-efficient high-throughput data processing, especially for emerging applications such as neuromorphic computing, quantum information, and microwave photonics. Success in these fields usually requires large-scale programmable PICs providing low-energy, compact, and high-speed building blocks with ultra-low insertion loss and precise control. Current programmable photonic systems, however, primarily rely on materials with weak and volatile thermo-optic or electro-optic modulation effects, leading to large footprints and high energy consumption. Alternatively, chalcogenide phase-change materials (PCMs) such as Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) exhibit a substantial optical contrast in a static, self-holding fashion upon phase transitions, but the complexity of present PCM-integrated photonic applications is still limited mainly due to the poor optical or electrical actuation approaches. In this dissertation, by integrating GST on silicon photonic devices, a highly scalable nonvolatile integrated phase-change photonic platform with strong broadband attenuation modulation and optical phase modulation for programmable photonics is demonstrated. Utilizing a free-space pulsed laser, reversible all-optically quasi-continuous programming of the platform is performed, resulting in a nonvolatile multi-level microring-based photonic switch with a high extinction ratio up to 33 dB. To extend the platform to a multi-port broadband scheme, compact (~30 micrometers), low-loss (~1 dB), and broadband (over 30 nm with cross talk less than -10 dB) 1 x 2 and 2 x 2 switches are demonstrated based on the asymmetric directional coupler design. Electrical switching of the platform with different heaters including graphene, indium tin oxide, and silicon PIN diode heaters that allows large-scale integration and fast energy-efficient large-area switching is then modeled and compared, followed by the experiment with PIN diode heaters. Using GST-clad silicon waveguides and microring resonators, intrinsically compact and energy-efficient photonic switching units operated with low driving voltages, near-zero additional loss, and reversible switching with long endurance are obtained in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible process. This work paves the way for the very large-scale CMOS-integrated programmable electronic-photonic systems such as optical neural networks and general-purpose integrated photonic processors.