Electrical Switching in Hybrid VO2/Si Photonic Structures

The integration of active materials on silicon is emerging as a promising field in silicon photonics to improve the performance metrics of key photonic components, in particular active components. Active materials allow tuning their optical properties as function of external stimuli. Amongst them, vanadium dioxide (VO2) has been largely investigated for different applications due to its controllable change between an insulating and a metallic phase. For photonic applications, VO2 shows a promising performance due to the abrupt change in the refractive index between the two phases across the semiconductor to metal transition (SMT). In this work, we will present our recent results for enabling disruptive electrical switching performance in hybrid VO2/Si photonic structures. Results have been obtained in the framework of the FP7-ICT-2013-11-61456 SITOGA project.