• 文献标题:   Modeling Electrical Switching of Nonvolatile Phase-Change Integrated Nanophotonic Structures with Graphene Heaters
  • 文献类型:   Article
  • 作  者:   ZHENG JJ, ZHU SF, XU PP, DUNHAM S, MAJUMDAR A
  • 作者关键词:   phasechange material, silicon photonic, graphene, nonvolatile, integrated nanophotonic structure, reconfigurable photonic
  • 出版物名称:   ACS APPLIED MATERIALS INTERFACES
  • ISSN:   1944-8244 EI 1944-8252
  • 通讯作者地址:   Univ Washington
  • 被引频次:   7
  • DOI:   10.1021/acsami.0c02333
  • 出版年:   2020

▎ 摘  要

Progress in integrated nanophotonics has enabled large-scale programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for general-purpose electronic-photonic systems on a chip. Relying on the weak, volatile thermo-optic, or electro-optic effects, such systems usually exhibit limited reconfigurability along with high-energy consumption and large footprints. These challenges can be addressed by resorting to chalcogenide phase-change materials (PCMs) such as Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) that provide a substantial optical contrast in a self-holding fashion upon phase transitions. However, current PCM-based integrated photonic applications are limited to single devices or simple PICs because of the poor scalability of the optical or electrical self-heating actuation approaches. Thermal-conduction heating via external electrical heaters, instead, allows large-scale integration and large-area switching, but fast and energy-efficient electrical control is yet to be achieved. Here, we model electrical switching of GST-clad-integrated nanophotonic structures with graphene heaters based on the programmable GST-on-silicon platform. Thanks to the ultralow heat capacity and high in-plane thermal conductivity of graphene, the proposed structures exhibit a high switching speed of similar to 80 MHz and a high energy efficiency of 19.2 aJ/nm(3) (6.6 aJ/nm(3)) for crystallization (amorphization) while achieving complete phase transitions to ensure strong attenuation (similar to 6.46 dB/mu m) and optical phase (similar to 0.28 p/mu m at 1550 nm) modulation. Compared with indium tin oxide and silicon p-i-n heaters, the structures with graphene heaters display two orders of magnitude higher figure of merits for heating and overall performance. Our work facilitates the analysis and understanding of the thermal-conduction heatingenabled phase transitions on PICs and supports the development of future large-scale PCM-based electronic-photonic systems.