Low-voltage broad-band electroabsorption from thin Ge/SiGe quantum wells epitaxially grown on silicon

We demonstrate electroabsorption contrast greater than 5 dB over the entire telecommunication S-and C-bands with only 1V drive using a new Ge/SiGe QW epitaxy design approach; further, this is demonstrated with the thinnest Ge/SiGe epitaxy to date, using a virtual substrate only 320-nm-thick. We use an eigenmode expansion method to model the optical coupling between SOI waveguides and both vertically and butt-coupled Ge/SiGe devices, and show that this reduction in thickness is expected to lead to a significant improvement in the insertion loss of waveguide-integrated devices. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America