  Programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are the foundation of
on-chip optical technologies with the optical modulators being one of the main
building blocks of such programmable PICs. However, most of the available
modulators suffer from high power consumption, low response time and large
footprint. To overcome some limitations the nonvolatile phase change materials
implemented in the plasmonic structures are proposed that can offer many
advantages as a result of high electric field interaction with nonvolatile
materials. Consequently, proposed here novel plasmonic nonvolatile switches can
operate by phase modulation, absorption modulation, or both and under
zero-static power. Thus, only 230 nm long active waveguide is needed to attain
full pi phase delay with an insertion loss of 0.12 dB. Apart from it, when
operating by amplitude modulation an extinction ration exceeding 2.2 dB/um can
be achieved while an insertion loss is kept at 0.185 dB/um. Furthermore, the
heating mechanism can be based on the external heaters, internal heaters,
electrical (memory) switching or optical switching mechanism what provide a lot
of flexibility in terms of a design and requirements.
