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Flexible inorganic electronic devices promise numerous applications, especially in fields that could not be covered satisfactorily by conventional rigid devices. Benefits on a similar scale are also foreseeable for silicon photonic components. However, the difficulty in transferring intricate silicon photonic devices has deterred widespread development. In this paper, we demonstrate a flexible single-crystal silicon nanomembrane photonic crystal microcavity through a bonding and substrate removal approach. The transferred cavity shows a quality factor of 2.2×10(4) and could be bent to a curvature of 5 mm radius without deteriorating the performance compared to its counterparts on rigid substrates. A thorough characterization of the device reveals that the resonant wavelength is a linear function of the bending-induced strain. The device also shows a curvature-independent sensitivity to the ambient index variation.

We present a dispersion engineered slow light silicon-based photonic crystal waveguide PIN modulator. Low-dispersion slow light transmission over 18 nm bandwidth under the silica light line with a group index of 26.5 is experimentally confirmed. We investigate the variations of the modulator figure of merit, V(π) × L, as a function of the optical carrier wavelength over the bandwidth of the fundamental photonic crystal waveguide defect mode. A large signal operation with a record low maximum V(π )× L of 0.0464 V · mm over the low-dispersion optical spectral range is demonstrated. We also report the device operation at 2 GHz.

This paper demonstrates transfer of optical devices without extra un-patterned silicon onto low-cost, flexible plastic substrates using single-crystal silicon nanomembranes. Employing this transfer technique, stacking two layers of silicon nanomembranes with photonic crystal waveguide in the first layer and multi mode interference couplers in the second layer is shown, respectively. This technique is promising to realize high density integration of multilayer hybrid structures on flexible substrates.

Silicon-organic hybrid integrated devices have emerging applications ranging from high-speed optical interconnects to photonic electromagnetic-field sensors. Silicon slot photonic crystal waveguides (PCWs) filled with electro-optic (EO) polymers combine the slow-light effect in PCWs with the high polarizability of EO polymers, which promises the realization of high-performance optical modulators. In this paper, a high-speed, power-efficient, low-dispersion, and compact optical modulator based on an EO polymer filled silicon slot PCW is presented. Lattice-shifted PCWs are utilized to engineer the photonic band diagram and thus enable an 8 nm-wide low-dispersion spectrum range, which is over an order of magnitude wider than that in modulators based on non-band-engineered PCWs and ring-resonators. A small voltage-length product of Vπ × L = 0.282 V × mm measured at 100 KHz is achieved by slow-light enhancement, corresponding to an unprecedented record-high effective in-device EO coefficient (r33) of 1230 pm/V among silicon-organic hybrid modulators. Excluding the slow-light effect, the actual in-device r33 is estimated to be 98 pm/V. By engineering the RC time constant via silicon doping and also utilizing a backside gate technique, the 3-dB modulation bandwidth of the device is measured to be 15 GHz. In addition, the RF power consumption of the modulator is estimated to be 24 mW at 10 GHz, and the estimated energy consumption for potential digital modulations is approximately 94.4 fJ/bit at 10 Gb/s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present the design, fabrication and characterization of a compact and highly sensitive integrated photonic electromagnetic field sensor based on a silicon-organic hybrid modulator driven by a bowtie antenna. Slow-light effects in the electro-optic (EO) polymer refilled silicon slot photonic crystal waveguide (PCW), together with broadband electric field enhancement provided by the bowtie antenna, are utilized to enhance the interaction of microwaves and optical waves, enabling an ultra large effective in-device EO coefficient over 1000 pm/V and thus a high sensitivity. The EO polymer refilled slot PCW is designed for low-dispersion slow-light propagation, high poling efficiency, and high optical mode confinement inside the slot. The bowtie antenna acts not only as a receiving antenna, but also as poling electrodes during the fabrication process. A bowtie antenna integrated on doped silicon slot PCW is demonstrated to have a broad operational bandwidth, with a maximum resonance at the frequency of 10 GHz. The strongly enhanced broadband electric field is used to directly modulate the phase of the optical waves propagating through the slot PCW embedded inside the feed gap of the bowtie antenna. The phase modulation is then converted to intensity modulation using an external reference arm to form a Mach-Zehnder interferometer in our experimental setup. The sensing of electromagnetic field at 8.4 GHz is experimentally demonstrated, with a minimum detectable electromagnetic power density of 8.4 mW/m2, corresponding to a minimum detectable electric field of 2.5 V/m. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Silicon photonics on unconventional substrates have demonstrated great promise in tremendous unprecedented applications. One challenge is transferring high quality and large scale crystalline silicon nanomembranes onto various substrates. We developed a low temperature nanomembrane transfer technique based on adhesive bonding and deep reactive ion etching. A large area (2 cm \times\,2 cm), 250 nm thick silicon nanomembrane is defect-freely transferred onto a glass slide. The average propagation loss of a single mode waveguide (500 nm wide) fabricated on the transferred silicon nanomembrane is \sim4.3~dB/cm, which is comparable with those fabricated on silicon-on-insulator. To demonstrate the capability of accommodating large scale intricate photonic circuit, a 1\,\times\,16 power splitter, consisting of photonic components with dimensions ranging from 119.4 \mum to as small as 80 nm, is fabricated. An output uniformity of 0.96 dB at 1545.6 nm across all channels and an insertion loss of 0.56 dB are experimentally demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We derive an analytical relation for the maximum number of output channels for high-performance multimode interference (MMI)-based 1 × N optical beam splitters for a given MMI width. Using eigenvalue-expansion-based simulation results, we validate the analytical relation. Experimental data from MMIs fabricated on silicon nanomembrane also confirm the effectiveness of the design methodology for on-chip optical beam splitter designs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]