This work introduces a 2×2 silicon thermo-optical switch based on photonic crystal waveguides. Photonic crystal waveguides (PCWs) were used to replace conventional channel waveguides in the phase shifters of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI). This device was fabricated on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. The active length of the PCWs-based phase shifter was only 50μm. Because of the slow light effect of PCWs, the heat needed to generate a phase shift of π reduced dramatically. The experiment results showed that the power needed for phase shifter of π is 6 times less than that of conventional MZI based optical switches.

Date Published: 14 February 2019
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 11048, 17th International Conference on Optical Communications and Networks (ICOCN2018), 110481Q (14 February 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2522209

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 11048:
17th International Conference on Optical Communications and Networks (ICOCN2018)
Zhaohui Li, Editor(s)