Plasmonic-Assisted High-Performance Electro-Absorption Modulator and Polarizer

A high-performance electro-absorption modulator that also functions as a TM pass polarizer is proposed. A very simple I-shaped HfO
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/ITO/HfO
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stack is deposited inside the silicon waveguide forming MOS capacitor in our proposed device. Plasmonics lead a significant role on the stack, and the modulator offers a very high extinction ratio of 35.3 dB/µm, excellent figure-of-merit of 882.42, and low insertion loss of 0.04 dB/µm at 1550 nm of wavelength. The 3-dB modulation bandwidth is 1591.55 GHz, which is very impressive with a 0.085 µm 3-dB length at the cost of 1.25 fj/bit energy consumption. The operating bandwidth is more than 280 nm, and the operating spectrum covers between 1450 nm to 1730 nm of wavelength. In addition, this modulator works as a TM pass polarizer, exhibiting a very high loss of 35.34 dB/µm for TE mode and, a very minimal loss of 0.1952 dB/µm for TM mode in its OFF state, resulting in a maximum loss ratio of around 180 between two polarized modes. Therefore, the proposed device has numerous applications including high-performance modulators and polarizers in optical communication systems.