Metal-insulator-Si hybrid plasmonic waveguide components for on-chip photonics

Vertical Cu-SiO₂-Si hybrid plasmonic components are experimentally demonstrated on a SOI platform using standard CMOS technology. The hybrid plasmonic waveguide (HPW) exhibits relatively low propagation loss of ~0.12 dB/μm and high coupling efficiency of ~86% with the conventional Si waveguides. The plasmonic waveguide-ring resonator with a compact radius of 1.59 μm exhibits high performance such as large extinction ratio of ~18 dB, small bandwidth of ~4 nm, and large free spectral range of ~74 nm. These superior performances as well as the fully CMOS compatibility make them promising building blocks for silicon electronic-photonic integrated circuits for data communications and sensing applications.