Advanced Silicon Photonics Designs for Lower Power, Ultrafast Switching with Integrated Phase Change Materials

The silicon photonics market continues to expand rapidly over a wide range of application areas including those related to optical computing. Innovations in silicon photonics design toward smaller footprint devices with lower power operation can also be applied to hybrid material platforms that take advantage of complementary material properties. In particular, hybrid integration of optical phase change materials with silicon photonics holds the potential to enable even faster and lower power switching on a platform that is compatible with CMOS electronics and can be fabricated at scale. In this presentation, we demonstrate how subwavelength-engineered photonic crystals can be employed to dramatically improve performance metrics of on-chip silicon photonic devices incorporating optical phase change materials, including vanadium dioxide. Prospects for foundry fabrication of such devices will also be discussed.