February 2021
Spotlight Summary by Bernhard Schmauss
Low-power and high-speed 2 × 2 thermo-optic MMI-MZI switch with suspended phase arms and heater-on-slab structure
In many applications of waveguide and fiber optics, switching is a crucial point, as switches have to be fast and have to show low losses and crosstalk. Accordingly, various technologies and architectures of optical switches have been developed over the last years. In their paper, Duan et.al. describe and demonstrate a significant progress in overall performance of a multimode interference coupler and Mach-Zehnder interferometer based switch structure in silicon on insulator technology. Laterally supported suspended ridge waveguide with metallic heaters are used as phase shifting elements in order to optimize the performance of the device.
The improvement steps, which are described in a compact and traceable way, result in an order of magnitude improvement of a figure of merit, which is given as the product of power consumption and thermal response time constant. Beside this, a demonstration of 10 kHz switching frequency at a low voltage difference of just 200 mV, an extinction of 30 dB and an insertion loss of less than 0.5 dB are remarkable. Despite the fact that this is just a four page paper, the authors also give a comparison of about 10 reported optical switches with different technologies and topologies, underlining their own achievements. About 30 references cover the most important aspects of the papers topic.
To conclude, Duan and coauthors achieved a remarkable progress in the field of the paper. They describe their work in a way that experts in the field as well as researchers with a basic knowledge of guided optical wave technology and components can benefit from studying this paper.
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The improvement steps, which are described in a compact and traceable way, result in an order of magnitude improvement of a figure of merit, which is given as the product of power consumption and thermal response time constant. Beside this, a demonstration of 10 kHz switching frequency at a low voltage difference of just 200 mV, an extinction of 30 dB and an insertion loss of less than 0.5 dB are remarkable. Despite the fact that this is just a four page paper, the authors also give a comparison of about 10 reported optical switches with different technologies and topologies, underlining their own achievements. About 30 references cover the most important aspects of the papers topic.
To conclude, Duan and coauthors achieved a remarkable progress in the field of the paper. They describe their work in a way that experts in the field as well as researchers with a basic knowledge of guided optical wave technology and components can benefit from studying this paper.
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Article Information
Low-power and high-speed 2 × 2 thermo-optic MMI-MZI switch with suspended phase arms and heater-on-slab structure
Fei Duan, Kai Chen, Da Chen, and Yonglin Yu
Opt. Lett. 46(2) 234-237 (2021) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF