Silica-Clad Silicon Photonic Crystal Waveguides for Wideband Dispersion–Free Slow Light

We comprehensively calculated the photonic bands of the waveguide modes in practical lattice-shifted photonic crystal waveguides, which are completely cladded by silica. We assumed various lattice shifts and found that the shift of the second rows and the mixed shift of the first and third rows along the waveguide generate low-dispersion slow light with group indices of 34-36, which is higher than those with a conventional shift of the third rows, maintaining a wide bandwidth over 10 nm at telecom wavelengths. We fabricated the waveguides using a CMOS-compatible process and confirmed correspondence with the calculation results. We also compared 25-Gb/s photonic crystal slow light Mach-Zehnder modulators and confirmed the improvement of the modulation efficiency by second-row shifts.