Highly Efficient ITO Assisted Silicon Waveguide based Compact Electro-Absorption Modulator

Optical modulators play a significant role in integrated photonics and are useful for high-speed switching and quantum computing. As a result, continuous effort is going on to produce efficient along with compact modulators to meet future requirements and plasmonic materials have a leading contribution for that. In this paper, a newly developed electro-absorption (EA) modulator, built on a composite indium-tin-oxide (ITO) included silicon waveguide, is proposed and analyzed by finite element method. An excellent balance between extinction ratio (ER) and insertion loss (IL) with a greater figure of merit (FOM) is achieved in our efficient device. This modulator has a higher FOM of 1109.79, a lower IL of 0.0208 dB/ μm, and a greater ER of about 23.08 dB/μm. The compact 3 dB length of the device (L<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3dB</inf>) is 130 nm, and the energy consumption (E<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">bit</inf>) is as low as 4.23 fJ/bit with a greater modulation bandwidth of over 470.2 GHz. Our modulator might be beneficial for the CMOS-compatible integrated photonics due to its compact size.