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Femtofarad optoelectronic integration demonstrating energy-saving signal conversion and nonlinear functions

Nature Photonics volume 13, pages 454–459 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

The introduction of photonic technologies into mature electronic circuits is in high demand to accelerate on-chip information networking and even computing. Great difficulty lies in the fact that the optoelectronic coupling at their interfaces requires a substantial charging energy determined by their capacitance. Optoelectronic devices have been too large to reduce the integrated capacitance down to the femtofarad scale. Here we use a photonic-crystal platform to demonstrate the first experimental proof of optoelectronic integration at only 2 fF. This allows us to realize a record-low attojoule-energy electro-optic modulator (an electrical-to-optical or E–O converter) and an amplifier-free photoreceiver (an optical-to-electrical, or O–E converter), which leads to ultralow-energy signal conversion. By integrating these O–E/E–O devices, we demonstrate femtofarad ‘O–E–O transistors’ with optical signal gain that show various optical nonlinear functions, including as all-optical switches, wavelength converters and cascadable optical repeaters with a femtojoule-per-bit energy consumption. These femtofarad-scale O–E/E–O/O–E–O devices promise tightly coupled photonic–electronic integration for new fields of energy-saving information processing.

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Fig. 1: PhC-nanocavity EOM.
Fig. 2: PD-EOM integration.
Fig. 3: Operation dynamics for the O–E–O transistor.
Fig. 4: Short pulse response.
Fig. 5: Optical signal conversion efficiency.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Asaoka, H. Onji, Y. Shouji and K. Ishibashi for their support in fabricating the device. This work was supported by CREST (JPMJCR15N4), the Japan Science and Technology Agency.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanophotonics Center, NTT Corporation, Atsugi, Japan

    Kengo Nozaki, Shinji Matsuo, Takuro Fujii, Koji Takeda, Akihiko Shinya, Eiichi Kuramochi & Masaya Notomi

  2. NTT Basic Research Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Atsugi, Japan

    Kengo Nozaki, Akihiko Shinya, Eiichi Kuramochi & Masaya Notomi

  3. NTT Device Technology Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Atsugi, Japan

    Shinji Matsuo, Takuro Fujii & Koji Takeda

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  1. Kengo Nozaki
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  5. Akihiko Shinya
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  6. Eiichi Kuramochi
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  7. Masaya Notomi
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Contributions

K.N. designed the devices and performed the measurements. S.M., T.F. and K.T. supported the design and fabrication of the samples. A.S. and E.K. supported the design and fabrication of the photonic-crystal structure. M.N. led the project. K.N. and M.N. conceived and planned this work, analysed the data and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Kengo Nozaki or Masaya Notomi.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Results and Discussion, Supplementary Figs. 1–12 and Supplementary Refs. 1–43.

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Nozaki, K., Matsuo, S., Fujii, T. et al. Femtofarad optoelectronic integration demonstrating energy-saving signal conversion and nonlinear functions. Nat. Photonics 13, 454–459 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-019-0397-3

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