Design and Analysis of Nonvolatile GSST-based Modulator Utilizing Engineered Mach-Zehnder Structure with Graphene Heaters

Abstract

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are the foundation of on-chip optical technologies. Mach-Zehnder modulators are appealing building blocks of PICs which mostly rely on weak and volatile optical effects in materials. In contrast, phase change materials such as GSST are promising candidates to realize efficient and nonvolatile reconfigurable optical devices. However, the phase transitions of PCMs are accompanied by large changes in the imaginary parts of their refractive indices which make the design of MZMs challenging. In this paper, two interesting design methods named as loss-balancing and pre equalization are introduced to propose high performance GSST based MZMs. In this regard, a GSST based waveguide with graphene as a microheater is proposed which plays the role of configurable active waveguide in both the introduced methods.