Non-Volatile and Ultra-Compact Photonic Memory

In this work, we propose a non-volatile and ultra-compact photonic flash memory by utilizing a transparent conducting oxide (TCO) as a floating gate. The memory acts as a non-volatile electro-absorption switch and exploits the epsilon-near-zero regime (ENZ) of the TCO floating gate for enabling the switching between two states with low and high optical losses. Our simulation shows that, by means of applying +11 V and –11 V voltage pulses, the memory is programmed or erased, respectively. Additionally, for a 5-μm-long device, the memory features negligible insertion losses and an optical extinction ratio of 35 dB with an inherent broadband wavelength operation due to its non-resonant response. This device could pave the way for developing high-density photonic memory banks on the silicon photonics platform.