The design and analysis of a CMOS-compatible silicon photonic ON–OFF switch based on a mode-coupling mechanism.

A directional-coupler-based 1 × 1 silicon-on-insulator photonic ON–OFF switch with a complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible driving voltage is proposed in this paper. The directional coupling of the switch is accomplished by a carrier injection method with the help of a P-i-N diode phase shifter. The advantage of using the directional coupler as a switch is its smaller layout requirement, which makes it more suitable for use in integrated photonic applications. The ON–OFF switch has potential applications in programmable photonic switch fabrics, where the OFF-state behavior is used to prevent the input from being propagated to the output. The proposed switch offers a wide range of cross power-coupling coefficient (κ 2) values, ranging from 0 to 0.3 for the ON-state and from 0.79 to 1 for the OFF-state. The finite-difference beam propagation and two-dimensional (2D) finite-difference time-domain methods are used for photonic simulations. The results are compared analytically using the coupled mode theory with the help of the MATLAB software package. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]