Abstract
High-performance waveguide is always the most important device in integrated silicon photonics. However, as the device size reduces, waveguide loss became significant due to surface roughness. In this paper, we demonstrated a novel silicon wire waveguide on SOI wafers by a simple etching and hydrogen annealing process. According to the measurement, the propagation loss and coupler loss of silicon wire waveguide are 1.26dB/cm and 2.5dB/side[33], respectively we also demonstrated that the nonlinear loss in this silicon wire waveguide was not obvious when the input power was lower than 500mW. We calculated the effective free carrier lifetime shorter than 10ns. Additionally, we observed the four-wave mixing in the silicon wire waveguide, and the maximum conversion efficiency was -32.84dB when the pump power was as high as 17.8dBm. The importance of four-wave mixing could be used for wavelength conversion in DWDM system. Finally, we demonstrated that we could control the free carrier density distribution in the si-wire waveguide by applying electric field at the two sides. Via this mechanism, we can implement a silicon-based optical modulator.