The development of silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) and plasmonic-organic hybrid (POH) electro-optic modulators in the 2010s has enabled the large electro-optic (EO) performance of organic chromophores to be leveraged for high-performance photonic components capable of integration with CMOS electronics. Recent improvements in theory-aided design and materials performance have enabled large increases in both electro-optic performance and materials stability. We report on the implications of these developments for hybrid device performance, manufacturability, processing, and packaging, as well as potential new directions for increasingly scalable fabrication of hybrid electro-optic devices for classical and quantum communications and computing applications.
Hybrid organic electro-optic (OEO) modulators consist of a layer of ordered organic chromophores confined between layers of metals or semiconductors, enabling optical fields to be tightly confined within the OEO material. The combination of tight confinement with the high electro-optic (EO) performance of state-of-the-art OEO materials enables extraordinary EO modulation performance in silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) and plasmonic-organic hybrid (POH) device architectures. Recent records in POH devices include bandwidths >500 GHz and energy efficiency <100 aJ/bit. To enable commercial applications of these materials and devices, however, they must withstand demanding thermal and environmental conditions, both during manufacture and operation. To address these concerns, we examined the long-term thermal and environmental shelf storage stability of state-of-the-art commercial and developmental OEO materials under a variety of conditions relevant to Telecordia GR-468-CORE standards. We examined the shelf storage of poled OEO materials under a nitrogen atmosphere at a range of temperatures from 85 ˚C up to 150 ˚C to understand the kinetics of the thermally activated de-poling of the OEO materials. We also examined the shelf storage of OEO materials under a variety of atmospheres, including the aggressive 85 ˚C and 85% relative humidity damp heat condition, to understand the relative sensitivities of the materials to water and oxygen at different temperatures. We analyze the results of these studies and discuss their implications for commercial application of these materials and devices, including manufacturing, encapsulation requirements, and expected operational lifetimes.
We review recent transformative advances in materials design, synthesis, and processing as well as device engineering for the utilization of organic materials in hybrid electro-optic (EO) and optical rectification (OR) technologies relevant to telecommunications, sensing, and computing. End-to-end (from molecules to systems) modeling methods utilizing multi-scale computation and theory permit prediction of the performance of novel materials in nanoscale device architectures including those involving plasmonic phenomena and architectures in which interfacial effects play a dominant role. Both EO and OR phenomenon require acentric organization of constituent active molecules. The incumbent methodology for achieving such organization is electric field poling, where chromophore shape, dipole moment, and conformational flexibility play dominant roles. Optimized chromophore design and control of the poling process has already led to record-setting advances in electro-optic performance, e.g., voltage-length performance of < 50 volt-micrometer, bandwidths < 500 GHz, and energy efficiency < 70 attojoule/bit. They have also led to increased thermal stability, low insertion loss and high signal quality (BER and SFDR). However, the limits of poling in the smallest nanophotonic devices—in which extraordinary optical field densities can be achieved—has stimulated development of alternatives based on covalent coupling of modern high-performance chromophores into ordered nanostructures. Covalent coupling enables higher performance, greater scalability, and greater stability and is especially suited for the latest nanoscale architectures. Recent developments in materials also facilitate a new technology—transparent photodetection based on optical rectification. OR does not involve electronic excitation, as is the case with conventional photodiodes, and as such represents a novel detection mechanism with a greatly reduced noise floor. OR already dominates at THz frequencies and recent advances will enable superior performance at GHz frequencies as well.
The development of silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) and plasmonic-organic hybrid (POH) electro-optic modulators in the 2010s has enabled the large electro-optic (EO) performance of organic chromophores to be leveraged for high-performance photonic components capable of integration with CMOS electronics. However, hybrid devices also present unique design considerations for maximizing material performance, including electrode-chromophore interactions, minimization of leak-through current, and maintaining material performance through all important processing and packaging steps. We report materials with an uncompromising combination of EO performance and thermal stability, as well as development of a new generation of materials and advances in processing techniques required to implement them for classical and quantum computing and networking applications.
Recent developments in hybrid electro-optic (EO) systems, in which an organic material with an ultra-large second-order susceptibility is combined with silicon (SOH) or gold (POH) waveguides at the nanoscale. Tight confinement of the optical and RF fields in such devices has enabled operating frequencies > 300 GHz and voltage-length parameters (UπL) < 40 V-μm with existing high-performance organic electro-optic (OEO) materials. However, achieving UπL values on the order of 1 V-μm will require a new generation of OEO materials. The short path lengths within hybrid devices greatly alleviate concerns about optical loss, enabling development of OEO chromophores with extraordinarily large hyperpolarizabilities and refractive indices at telecom wavelengths. However, as device dimensions shrink, chromophore-surface interactions, space-efficiency, and refractive index anisotropy become more critical. Practical device implementations also require materials with high thermal and chemical stability and uncompromising EO performance. We have used a theory-aided design process applying classical and quantum mechanical techniques to design a new generation of OEO materials intended to meet the needs of hybrid devices. We have synthesized these materials, characterized their hyperpolarizability by hyper-Rayleigh scattering, and evaluated their bulk electro-optic behavior and prospects for implementation in nanoscale devices.
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