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Programmable photonic arrays based on microelectromechanical elements with femtowatt-level standby power consumption

Nature Photonics volume 17, pages 1089–1096 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Programmable photonic integrated circuits offer exciting opportunities for optoelectronic signal processing, computing and communications in a number of emerging applications in classical and quantum photonics. In this work, we show the array-level demonstration of tunable couplers and phase shifters with capacitive electrostatic microelectromechanical actuators in a recirculating mesh network. The overall fabrication process is compatible with the conventional wafer-level passive silicon photonics platform. Extremely low unit-level standby power consumption of <10 femtowatts and reconfiguration energy of <40 picojoules with <11 V programming voltages offer well-balanced, scalable routes for efficient phase and amplitude modulation of the guided lightwaves with sub-decibel optical losses. The extinction ratios of the continuously tunable directional coupler exceed 30 dB. Full 2π-phase shifting can be achieved with a modulation efficiency of less than 0.075 V cm and a phase-dependent insertion-loss variation of 0.01 dB.

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Fig. 1: Scalable, low-loss and <10-fW-static-power PPIC.
Fig. 2: Measured characteristics of the MEMS-tunable elements.
Fig. 3: MEMS-based recirculating-type PPIC and its measured spectral responses at various configurations.
Fig. 4: A MEMS-based 2 × 2 unitary gate and its measured responses.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots and findings within this paper are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This research project was partially supported by the Samsung Research Funding & Incubation Center of Samsung Electronics under project no. SRFC-IT2002-04. This work was further supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea under Grant NRF-2020M3F6A1082703. The devices were fabricated at the National Nanofab Center (NNFC), South Korea. We thank J.-B. You for discussions regarding the fabrication process at NNFC.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Dong Uk Kim, Young Jae Park, Do Yun Kim, Youngjae Jeong.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Daegu, Republic of Korea

    Dong Uk Kim, Young Jae Park, Do Yun Kim, Min Gi Lim, Myung Seok Hong, Man Jae Her, Dong Ju Choi & Sangyoon Han

  2. School of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    Youngjae Jeong, Yoonhyuk Rah & Kyoungsik Yu

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Contributions

D.U.K., Y.J.P., D.Y.K. and Y.J. contributed equally to the manuscript. D.U.K. contributed to the optical simulations of the devices. Y.J.P., D.Y.K., D.U.K. and Y.J. contributed to the layout design of the chip. D.U.K., Y.J.P., Y.J., D.Y.K., M.G.L., M.S.H., M.J.H., D.J.C. and Y.R. contributed to the characterization of the devices. Y.J. contributed to the mechanical simulation and electrical measurement. S.H. and K.Y. jointly conceived the idea of the project, supervised the project and wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Sangyoon Han or Kyoungsik Yu.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Performance comparisons of PPIC platforms with experimental demonstrations with either array-level or unit-level.

a, b, Performance comparisons of PPIC platforms with experimental demonstrations with either array-level or unit-level; Static power and switching energy per phase shifter device (optical loss in parentheses) (a), Optical loss and Lπ length of the phase shifter devices (response time in parentheses) (b). In these figures, each data point represents the best combination of specifications selected from all relevant references pertaining to that specific platform. Therefore, it should be noted that the actual performances of the individual references are inferior to what is illustrated in the figures except for our platform. The references are listed in Extended Data Table 2.

Extended Data Table 1 Phase shifter performances of different PIC platforms with array-level demonstrations for near-infrared wavelengths21,24,33,34,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Phase shifter performances of different PIC platforms with either array-level or unit-level demonstrations for near-infrared wavelengths
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections 1–10, Figs. 1–14, Tables 1 and 2 and discussion.

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Kim, D.U., Park, Y.J., Kim, D.Y. et al. Programmable photonic arrays based on microelectromechanical elements with femtowatt-level standby power consumption. Nat. Photon. 17, 1089–1096 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01327-5

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