High-Performance Modulators Employing Organic Electro-Optic Materials on the Silicon Platform

Silicon photonic integrated circuits comprising electro-optic modulators are key to a broad spectrum of applications. However, while the silicon photonics platform takes advantage of the well-established complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) processing technology for fabricating silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguides with high reproducibility, crystalline silicon lacks a second-order nonlinear susceptibility, which limits the functionality of the entire integration platform. The plasma dispersion effect provides an alternative means to change the refractive index by injection or depletion of carriers, but this approach has some disadvantages with respect to speed, efficiency, and footprint. Complementing silicon with Pockels-type.