Si microring resonator optical switch based on optical phase shifter with ultrathin-InP/Si hybrid metal-oxide-semiconductor capacitor.

We propose a microring resonator (MRR) optical switch based on III-V/Si hybrid metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) optical phase shifter with an ultrathin InP membrane. By reducing the thickness of the InP membrane, we can reduce the insertion loss of the phase shifter, resulting in a high-quality-factor (Q-factor) MRR switch. By optimizing the device structure using numerical analysis, we successfully demonstrated a proof-of-concept MRR optical switch. The optical switch exhibits 0.3 pW power consumption for switching, applicable to power-efficient, thermal-crosstalk-free, Si programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs) based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).