Integrated Ultra-High Performance Graphene Optical Modulator

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project aims at developing a commercially viable, ten microns long graphene optical modulator laterally integrated with a silicon waveguide and optical light source for large bandwidth optical communication and computing applications such as supercomputers, data centers and so on. Compared to the conventional optical modulators, graphene modulators have attracted great interests due to their high speed operation with an ultra-compact foot-print and broadband operation. However, due to poor overlap of optical fields with graphene layers, their practical applications are limited by the trade-off between modulation speed and energy per bit power consumption. Here we propose a graphene optical modulators based on the distributed Bragg reflector waveguide design which new avenues for strengthening graphene-light interactions into the device with an extremely low loss. The Bragg reflector waveguide provides a factor of > 40 reduction in interaction length compared to conventional waveguides leading to enhance the optical absorption with a shorter modulator length. This design promises an ultra-high operation with few Femtojoule per bit power consumption in entire C- and L- bands. The CMOS compatible platform will ensure high volume and low cost production of devices.