Design of an Ultra-Small Footprint Graphene-based Silicon Photonic Bandgap Modulator

We propose a novel design of an ultra-small footprint silicon photonic modulator based on the fast charging and discharging of a graphene capacitor using a photonic bandgap structure. The device length is about 6 μm and with about 1 V pp the modulator should attain 15 dB extinction ratio due to the high mode confinement of the photonic bandgap microcavity. Graphene's exceptional electro-optical properties makes it suitable for single carrier 100Gbit/s modulation.