Low-loss metal-insulator-semiconductor waveguide with an air core for on-chip integration

In this paper, a novel metal-insulator-semiconductor waveguide with an air core in the insulator layer is proposed in order to improve the on-chip integration. Compared with the structure with homogeneous insulator, the introduced air core provides an additional degree of freedom for tuning the characteristics of the hybrid plasmonic mode. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed structure exhibits better tradeoff between the mode confinement and the propagation length. The relatively low crosstalk between adjacent proposed waveguides could be achieved and the coupling efficiency between conventional silicon waveguide and the proposed structure maintain. The proposed waveguide could be used to build ultra-compact photonic components and enable on-chip integration of photonic circuits. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.