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Abstract Ultracompact and low‐power‐consumption optical switches are desired for high‐performance telecommunication networks and data centers. Here, we demonstrate an on‐chip power‐efficient 2 × 2 thermo‐optic switch unit by using a suspended photonic crystal nanobeam structure. A submilliwatt switching power of 0.15 mW is obtained with a tuning efficiency of 7.71 nm/mW in a compact footprint of 60 μm × 16 μm. The bandwidth of the switch is properly designed for a four‐level pulse amplitude modulation signal with a 124 Gb/s raw data rate. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed switch is the most power‐efficient resonator‐based thermo‐optic switch unit with the highest tuning efficiency and data ever reported.
Zhang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.