The Design of a Low-Loss, Fast-Response, Metal Thermo-Optic Phase Shifter Based on Coupled-Mode Theory

Abstract

A thermo-optic phase shifter is of great importance in silicon photonics. However, it is difficult to simultaneously achieve a good performance in insertion loss and in response speed by using traditional thermal tuning through a metallic heater. In this paper, based on coupled-mode theory, we propose a method to place high-loss materials close to the optical waveguide while maintaining the low loss of the optical device, which ensures the low insertion loss (~0.78 dB) of the phase shifter. Additionally, thanks to the very short distance between the rib waveguide and the chromium (Cr) heater, the phase shifter exhibits a high response speed (1.15 μs in rise time and 2.18 μs in decay time) with a measured bandwidth (BW) of 186 kHz. Moreover, we further optimize the structure of phase shifters, leading to the reduction of π-shift power consumption from 25.1 mW to 13.6 mW. Our proposed phase shifters have great potential in large-scale silicon photonic integrated circuits.

Keywords

• silicon photonics
• phase shifter
• coupled-mode theory