Numerical investigation of an electro-optic majority voting circuit utilizing graphene-silicon nitride waveguides

Abstract In this paper, an electro-optic majority voting circuit based on graphene-silicon nitride waveguides is proposed and numerically investigated. The proposed circuit is composed of 2×1 multimode interference combiners and Mach-Zehnder interferometers where graphene-silicon nitride waveguides are designed for phase shifters. By adjusting graphene’s chemical potential electrically, the proposed graphene-silicon nitride waveguide has a large variation in the real part of the effective refractive index so that a relatively compact and low-energy-consumption majority voting circuit can be realized. Simulation results show that as graphene’s chemical potential is increased from 0.50 to 0.60 eV at an operating wavelength of 1550 nm, the designed graphene-silicon nitride waveguide with a 5 nm spacer of TiO 2 can have 0.34 pJ/bit energy consumption and V π • L π of 43.15 V•μm.The corresponding electro-optic majority voting circuit has an extinction ratio larger than 20.11 dB.