Athermal electro-optic trimmable waveguide design

Abstract

High-speed photonic circuits suffer from unnecessary static and dynamic power consumption required for the correction of fabrication non-uniformities and thermal drifts. We propose amorphous silicon on lithium niobate waveguides with a titanium dioxide cladding to obtain a versatile integrated photonics platform. The linear electro-optic tuning mechanism of lithium niobate can be utilized for a tunability up to -7.2 · 10-6 V-1, while the titanium dioxide cladding is employed to minimize the temperature sensitivity and thus the influence of thermal drifts.