Design and simulation of a hybrid silicon/electro-optic polymer modulator

The design and simulation of a novel resonant cavity optical modulator is presented in this work. The device incorporates a hybrid silicon/electro-optic polymer waveguide in the cavity region with a distributed Bragg reflector in a single mode silicon waveguide on each side of the cavity to create a modulator with a large modulation depth, short device length and a low drive voltage for use in future high speed integrated optics applications. Full 3D simulations of this device structure are very computationally expensive; therefore the periodicity of the device has been exploited to allow for a cascade matrix approach to be employed to reduce the time/computational resources necessary for accurate simulation of light propagation during the optimization phase of the device design.