206 / 2024-07-14 03:09:06

Rapidly reconfigurable low-loss phase change materials for photonic applications

Phase change materials, integrated photonics circuits, reconfigurable and tunable photonics

Programmable and reconfigurable photonics will revolutionize the next generation of optical-based photonics processors, optical signal processing tools, as well as photonic neural and quantum networks. Ultra-low loss phase-change technology has the enormous potential to offer energy-efficient, extra large-scale integrated (ELSI) nonvolatile programmable photonics that can overcome the limitations of many volatile and energy-hungry programmable photonic systems used in such applications. So far, most phase change materials (PCM) devices have already shown to be suitable for programmable and reconfigurable photonic circuit applications that do no require extreme endurance or ultra-fast switching speeds, ie, quasi-static devices. Unfortunately, there are many applications where high speeds and multi-million-level cycling are needed, such as memory cells for in-memory computing, quantum computing protocols, optical displays, and optical modulators. This necessitates enormous improvements in the existing cycling speed and endurance of PCMs, for high-performance device configuration.



Our recent efforts, have allowed us to demonstrate the switching of an ultra-low loss PCM (Sb2Se3 ) with an unprecedented combination of rapid cycling speed ( 10⁶cycles/s) and extreme endurance ( 10 million cycles) without noticeable degradation. This turns out to be born out of extremely careful thermal engineering at the nanoscale, which enables us to avoid thermal trapping and structural/chemical modification of the material which eventually leads to failure. A variety of applications will be proposed and discussed, validating that this work does indeed pave the way for ultrafast, large-scale, programmable, and reconfigurable integrated photonic circuits and devices.