Investigation of Dual-Layer Si-ITO-Dielectric Based Hybrid Plasmonic Electro-Absorption Modulator at 1.55 µm Wavelength

In this paper, a dual-layer plasmonic material-based electro-absorption modulator (EAM) is designed and investigated. Indium-tin-oxide (ITO), along with dielectric materials such as boron nitride (hBN) and hafnium dioxide (HfO2), is integrated into the Si waveguide for tuning the light propagating inside the device. The device showed enhanced performance in terms of extinction ratio (ER) = 34.48 dB/µm, the figure of merit (FOM) = 493, and insertion loss (IL) = 0.06 dB/µm for On-state at 1.55 µm wavelength. Also, the dual-state behavior of the EAM was observed and investigated. An IL of 22.22 dB/µm and 25.39 dB/µm was observed for the Off-On and On-Off configurations, respectively. A modulation frequency (f3dB) of 1.72 THz and 340 GHz was achieved for the EAM with hBN and HfO2 as the dielectric material. The investigated EAM with different dielectric materials has the potential to be integrated into future-generation photonic integrated circuits (PICs).