First Demonstration of HZO-LNOI Integrated Ferroelectric Electro-Optic Modulator and Memory to Enable Reconfigurable Photonic Systems

We have successfully demonstrated, for the first time, an innovative back-end-of-line (BEOL) compatible electro-optic modulator and memory (EOMM) based on Lithium Niobate on Insulator (LNOI) micro-ring resonator (MRR) integrated with Ferroelectric Hafnium Zirconate Hf
0.5
Zr
0.5
O (HZO) non-volatile analog memory. High non-volatile memory and modulation performances are both achieved in a single compact device, exhibiting high extinction ratio of 13.3 dB, excellent efficiency of 66pm/V, stable nine-state switching, record-high endurance exceeding 10
⁹
cycles. This is accomplished by utilizing Pockels effect in LNOI, induced by electric-field effect from remnant HZO ferroelectric polarization. We studied the system implementation of reconfigurable chiplet-interposer photonic interconnect, enabled by the EOMM and EOMM with hybrid thermal-optical modulation. Our model shows a potential 70% energy efficiency improvement over conventional electrical interposer interconnect. We have also tested the integration of the EOMM with POET technologies’ 400G Tx/Rx optical interposer chip and studied a limited scale demonstration of the EOMM device.