International Business Machines Corporation

Gustavo Ferreira Villares

Charles Caër

Herwig Hahn

Marc Seifried

A silicon photonic device is provided including a substrate; a passive silicon optical device, on the substrate; an electrically insulating cladding layer that encapsulates the optical device on the substrate, the cladding layer including a trench patterned therein, so as for the trench to at least partly cover the optical device, on a side of the latter, the trench filled with an electrically insulating, thermally conducting material, having a refractive index that is lower than a refractive index of silicon, thereby forming a heat conduction channel toward the optical device; and a heating element, in contact with the thermally conducting material. A method of operating such silicon photonic devices is also provided.

Silicon photonic tunable device with thermo-optic channel

The invention is directed to a hybrid, vertical current injection electro-optical device, comprising an active region and one or more current blocking layers. The active region includes a stack of III-V semiconductor gain materials designed for optical amplification. The gain materials of the stack are stacked along a stacking direction z, which is perpendicular to a main plane of the stack. The one or more current blocking layers extend perpendicularly to the stacking direction z and laterally on opposite sides of the active region. The one or more current blocking layers each have an effective refractive index nthat is matched to the effective refractive index n of the active region, i.e., n=f&#xd7;n, with f&#x2208;[0.95; 1.05]. The invention is further directed to a silicon photonics chip comprising such an electro-optical device.

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Zurich, Switzerland

Gustavo Ferreira Villares