Integrated ultra-high-performance graphene optical modulator

With the growing demand for massive amounts of data processing transmission and storage it is becoming more challenging to optimize the trade off between high speed and energy consumption in current optoelectronic devices. Heterogeneous material integration into Silicon and Nitride photonics has demonstrated high speed potential but with millimeter to centimeter large footprints. The search for an electro optic modulator that combines high speed with energy efficiency and compactness to enable high component density on chip is yet ongoing. Here we demonstrate a 60 GHz fast (3dB roll off) micrometer compact and 4 fJ per bit efficient Graphene based modulator integrated on Silicon photonics platform. Two dual Graphene layers are capacitively biased into modulating the waveguide modes optical effective index via Pauli blocking mechanism. The electro optic response which is further enhanced by a vertical distributed Bragg reflector cavity thus reducing the drive voltage by about 40 times while preserving an adequate modulation depth (10 dB). Compact efficient and fast modulators enable high photonic chip density and performance with key applications in signal processing sensor platforms and analog and neuromorphic photonic processors.