Design and Analysis of a Novel Graphene-Assisted Silica/Polymer Hybrid Waveguide With Thermal–Optical Phase Modulation Structure

A novel thermal–optical phase modulation structure based on polymer/silica hybrid waveguide is proposed. Patterned graphene strip is introduced as electric nanoheater in the structure. Finite element method simulation is performed on both thermal and optical field analysis. Results show that response speed is improved by a factor of three and power consumption is reduced by half, in comparison with conventional state-of-art polymer-based phase shifter. This proposed structure is compatible with current complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor power supply standard and has very large design robustness. It shows great application potential on low-power optical switch, modulator and polymer thermal–optical phase arrays.