On-Chip All-Optical Switching and Memory by Silicon Photonic Crystal Nanocavities

We review our recent studies on all-optical switching and memory operations based on thermo-optic and carrier-plasma nonlinearities both induced by two-photon absorption in silicon photonic crystal nanocavities. Owing to high-Q and small volume of these photonic crystal cavities, we have demonstrated that the switching power can be largely reduced. In addition, we demonstrate that the switching time is also reduced in nanocavity devices because of their short diffusion time. These features are important for all-optical nonlinear processing in silicon photonics technologies, since silicon is not an efficient optical nonlinear material. We discuss the effect of the carrier diffusion process in our devices, and demonstrate improvement in terms of the response speed by employing ion-implantation process. Finally, we show that coupled bistable devices lead to all-optical logic, such as flip-flop operation. These results indicate that a nanocavity-based photonic crystal platform on a silicon chip may be a promising candidate for future on-chip all-optical information processing in a largely integrated fashion.