Photonic integrated circuit technology, in particular, silicon photonics has emerged as a suitable technology to scale the performance of high-performance computers and data processors. Unlike electronics, PIC is formed by many functional active and passive building blocks, such as, waveguides, wavelength selective device, polarization rotators, couplers, light modulators, etc.

An optical modulator is one of the important active devices that imprints an electrical signal on to an optical carrier. One way of achieving this is by changing/modulating the property of the optical carrier. In silicon, optical modulator is implemented by carrier dispersion effect through phase modulation. The speed at which this device can modulate is limited by carrier life time.

In this research work, we explore high-mobility low-dimension materials and III-V semiconductor materials on-top of Silicon that can be heterogeneously integrated to increase the modulation limits.