Thermally robust compact single Bragg grating silicon modulator for photonic computing

We report, to our knowledge, a novel compact, thermally operated optical modulator with 6-bit resolution. The device comprises a slow-light photonic structure, a Bragg grating with a footprint of 10µ<i>m</i> by 50µ<i>m</i>. This single Bragg-grating modulator (SBG-M) operates based on thermally induced band edge shift of the photonic stop band and demonstrates almost constant normalized mean square error (NMSE) lower than 0.001 from room temperature to 40^∘<i>C</i>, while maintaining thermal robustness up to 65^∘<i>C</i> limited by the Johnson noise of the on-chip photodetector. The clock frequency, computing accuracy, power consumption, thermal stability, and fabrication-induced spectrum non-ideality are thoroughly studied. The SBG-M achieves a measured lowest NMSE of 5.0×10^-4, with an average power consumption of 5.29 mW. Compared to other optical devices such as micro-ring resonators and slow-light incorporated Mach-Zehnder modulators, the reported device demonstrates significant advantages in compactness, lower power consumption, and thermal robustness.