Design and analysis of ultra-compact EO polymer modulators based on hybrid plasmonic microring resonators.

Ultra-compact EO polymer modulators based on hybrid plasmonic microring resonators are proposed, simulated and analyzed. Comparing with Si slot microring modulator, hybrid plasmonic microring modulator shows about 6-times enhancement of the figure of merit when the bending radius is around 510 nm, due to its much larger intrinsic quality factor in sub-micron radius range. Influences of the EO polymer height and Si height on the device's performance are analyzed and optimal design is given. When operating with a bias of 3.6 V, the proposed device has optical modulation amplitude of 0.8 and insertion loss of about 1 dB. The estimated power consumption is about 5 fJ/bit at 100 GHz.