REVIEW ARTICLE

Thermo-optic phase shifters based on silicon-on-insulator platform: state-of-the-art and a review

  • Shengping Liu ,
  • Junbo Feng ,
  • Ye Tian ,
  • Heng Zhao ,
  • Li Jin ,
  • Boling Ouyang ,
  • Jiguang Zhu ,
  • Jin Guo
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  • Chongqing United Microelectronics Center, Chongqing 401332, China

Received date: 26 Jul 2021

Accepted date: 04 Oct 2021

Published date: 15 Mar 2022

Copyright

2022 The Author(s) 2022

Abstract

Silicon photonic platforms offer relevance to large markets in many applications, such as optical phased arrays, photonic neural networks, programmable photonic integrated circuits, and quantum computation devices. As one of the basic tuning devices, the thermo-optic phase shifter (TOPS) plays an important role in all these applications. A TOPS with the merits of easy fabrication, low power consumption, small thermal time constant, low insertion loss, small footprint, and low crosstalk, is needed to improve the performance and lower the cost of the above applications. To meet these demands, various TOPS have been proposed and experimentally demonstrated on different foundry platforms In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art of TOPS, including metal heater, doped silicon, silicide, with silicon substrate undercut for heat insulation, folded waveguide structure, and multi-pass waveguide structure. We further compare these TOPSs and propose the directions of the future developments on TOPS.

Cite this article

Shengping Liu , Junbo Feng , Ye Tian , Heng Zhao , Li Jin , Boling Ouyang , Jiguang Zhu , Jin Guo . Thermo-optic phase shifters based on silicon-on-insulator platform: state-of-the-art and a review[J]. Frontiers of Optoelectronics, 2022 , 15(1) : 9 . DOI: 10.1007/s12200-022-00012-9

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