CMOS compatible micro-oven heater for efficient thermal control of silicon photonic devices

We present a heater design for efficient thermo-optic control of silicon photonic devices. The oven-shaped heater is simply realized by using metal contacts/via's in a standard CMOS process. We found both theoretically and experimentally that the micro-oven doubles the heating efficiency over traditional metal strip heaters. Compared to existing high efficiency heater designs, the oven heater is more robust and most importantly it can be easily integrated into electro-optic modulator devices. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.