A Segmented Heater-Driven, Low-Loss, Reconfigurable Photonic Phase-Change Material-Based Phase Shifter

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Auteurs principaux: Dwivedi, Ranjeet, Yadav, Agraj, Orobtchouk, Regis, Charbonnier, Benoit, Malhouitre, Stephane, Noé, Pierre, Pavanello, Fabio
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Dwivedi, Ranjeet
Yadav, Agraj
Orobtchouk, Regis
Charbonnier, Benoit
Malhouitre, Stephane
Noé, Pierre
Pavanello, Fabio
author_facet Dwivedi, Ranjeet
Yadav, Agraj
Orobtchouk, Regis
Charbonnier, Benoit
Malhouitre, Stephane
Noé, Pierre
Pavanello, Fabio
contents Phase-change material (PCM)-based non-volatile multilevel phase shifters are key components in photonic integrated circuits. Electrically, multiple phase levels can be encoded by controlling the heater power and employing different microheater architectures to induce varying degrees of PCM amorphization. However, encoding a large number of levels is not straightforward. In this work, we first investigate a phase shifter structure based on a GeSe PCM integrated on top of a silicon-on-insulator waveguide, employing a simple rectangular-shaped heater under pulse-width modulation (PWM). We numerically demonstrate that multilevel phase shifts can be achieved because of non-uniform heating in the GeSe PCM layer. However, the resulting phase levels for this basic configuration are highly non-linear because of the uniform power dissipation along the light propagation direction characterized by the same cross-section. To overcome this limitation, we designed a novel PCM-based phase shifter with a segmented heater whose width gradually increases along the light propagation direction. This configuration enables the encoding of hundreds of well-spaced phase levels between 0 and $π$, facilitated by smoother amorphization arising from the combined effects of non-uniform heating across segments and within each segment, while achieving an insertion loss of only 0.6 dB in the worst case. Furthermore, when evaluating both heater architectures under pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) at a fixed pulse duration, we observe behavior consistent with the trends observed for PWM, confirming the superior performance of the segmented heater design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_18800
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Segmented Heater-Driven, Low-Loss, Reconfigurable Photonic Phase-Change Material-Based Phase Shifter
Dwivedi, Ranjeet
Yadav, Agraj
Orobtchouk, Regis
Charbonnier, Benoit
Malhouitre, Stephane
Noé, Pierre
Pavanello, Fabio
Optics
Phase-change material (PCM)-based non-volatile multilevel phase shifters are key components in photonic integrated circuits. Electrically, multiple phase levels can be encoded by controlling the heater power and employing different microheater architectures to induce varying degrees of PCM amorphization. However, encoding a large number of levels is not straightforward. In this work, we first investigate a phase shifter structure based on a GeSe PCM integrated on top of a silicon-on-insulator waveguide, employing a simple rectangular-shaped heater under pulse-width modulation (PWM). We numerically demonstrate that multilevel phase shifts can be achieved because of non-uniform heating in the GeSe PCM layer. However, the resulting phase levels for this basic configuration are highly non-linear because of the uniform power dissipation along the light propagation direction characterized by the same cross-section. To overcome this limitation, we designed a novel PCM-based phase shifter with a segmented heater whose width gradually increases along the light propagation direction. This configuration enables the encoding of hundreds of well-spaced phase levels between 0 and $π$, facilitated by smoother amorphization arising from the combined effects of non-uniform heating across segments and within each segment, while achieving an insertion loss of only 0.6 dB in the worst case. Furthermore, when evaluating both heater architectures under pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) at a fixed pulse duration, we observe behavior consistent with the trends observed for PWM, confirming the superior performance of the segmented heater design.
title A Segmented Heater-Driven, Low-Loss, Reconfigurable Photonic Phase-Change Material-Based Phase Shifter
topic Optics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18800