Energy efficient microheaters for silicon photonic circuits

In this talk, I will introduce the recent advances of integrated microwave photonics in our group, including arbitrary waveform generator, microwave photonic filter, and energy efficient microheater in a chip. By incorporating a graphene on a slow-light silicon photonic crystal waveguide, we experimentally demonstrate an energy-efficient graphene microheater with a tuning efficiency of 1.07 nm/mW and power consumption per free spectral range (FSR) of 3.99 mW. The rise and decay times (10% to 90%) are only 750 ns and 525 ns, which, to the best of our knowledge, are the fastest reported response times for microheaters in silicon photonics.