Polarization-encodable photonic memory cells using next-generation 2D phase-change materials

Amin Shafiee^{¹^,^§}, Linhong Chen^{²^,^§}, Mahdi Nikdast^¹

(), Jie Yao^²

()

1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA

2Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

^§ Amin Shafiee and Linhong Chen contributed equally to this work.

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In this study, we demonstrate the proof of concept of polarization-encodable photonic memory cells using tin selenide (SnSe) to implement next-generation photonic memory cells for high-performance computing systems.

Abstract

Integration of phase-change materials (PCMs) created a unique opportunity to implement reconfigurable photonics devices that their performance can be tuned depending on the target application. Conventional PCMs such as Ge-Sb-Te (GST) and Ge-Sb-Se-Te (GSST) rely on melt-quench and high temperature annealing processes to change the organization of the molecules in the materials’ crystal. Such a reorganization leads to different optical, electrical, and thermal properties which can be exploited to implement photonic memory cells that are able to store the data at different resistance or optical transmission levels. Despite the great promise of conventional PCMs for realizing reconfigurable photonic memories, their slow and extremely power-hungry thermal mechanisms make scaling the systems based on such devices challenging. In addition, such materials do not offer a stable multi-level response over a long period of time. To address these shortcomings, the research carried out in this study shows the proof of concept to implement next-generation photonic memory cells based on two-dimensional (2D) birefringence PCMs such as SnSe, which offer anisotropic optical properties that can be switched ferroelectrically. We demonstrate that by leveraging the ultrafast and low-power crystallographic direction change of the material, the optical polarization state of the input optical signal can be changed. This enables the implementation of next-generation high-speed polarization-encodable photonic memory cells for future photonic computing systems. Compared to the conventional PCMs, the proposed SnSe-based photonic memory cells offer an ultrafast switching and low-loss optical response relying on ferroelectric property of SnSe to encode the data on the polarization state of the input optical signal. Such a polarization encoding scheme also reduces memory read-out errors and alleviates the scalability limitations due to the optical insertion loss often seen in optical transmission encoding.

Keywords

ferroelectric materials phase-change materials photonic memory optical storage cells polarization encodable photonic memories optical polarization

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References

[1]

Shafiee, A.; Pasricha, S.; Nikdast, M. A survey on optical phase-change memory: The promise and challenges. IEEE Access 2023, 11, 11781–11803.