Pulse Driving of Thermo-Optic Phase Shifters on an InP Membrane

Thermo-optic phase shifters (TOPS) have been widely applied in photonic integrated circuits (PIC), as they offer a straightforward way of phase tuning by locally heating the optical waveguide. Leveraging direct waveguide heating, an ultra-compact, efficient TOPS has been recently demonstrated on an InP membrane, that allows native integration with active components. In this paper, we apply a pulse-driving method on this InP-membrane-based TOPS to drastically boost the tuning speed by more than one order of magnitude, from 26.67 µs to 3.25 µs.