Design of 2D Photonic Crystals for Integrated Optical Slow-Light Applications

2D photonic crystal waveguides have been designed in both GaAs/AlGaAs and SOI platforms for slow-light applications in planar lightwave circuits. The design parameters have been optimized using commercial FDTD tool. The extracted group velocity of a single-mode SOI photonic crystal waveguide has been shown to be 3–10 times slower than that of a photonic wire waveguide operating in third generation optical communication window (λ ~ 1,550 nm). This reduced group velocity has been exploited to design a plasma dispersion based compact SOI modulator with Lπ ~70 μm.