Abstract
Electro-optic (EO) modulators with a high modulation bandwidth are indispensable parts of an optical interconnect system. A key requirement for an energy-efficient EO modulator is the low drive voltage, which can be provided using a standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor circuity without an amplifying driver. Thin-film lithium niobate has emerged as a new promising platform, and shown its capable of achieving driverless and high-speed EO modulators. In this paper, we report a compact high-performance modulator based on the thin-film lithium niobate platform on a silicon substrate. The periodic capacitively loaded travelling-wave electrode is employed to achieve a large modulation bandwidth and a low drive voltage, which can support a driverless single-lane 100Gbaud operation. The folded modulation section design also helps to reduce the device length by almost two thirds. The fabricated device represents a large EO bandwidth of 45GHz with a half-wave voltage of 0.7V. The driverless transmission of a 100Gbaud 4-level pulse amplitude modulation signal is demonstrated with a power consumption of 4.49fj/bit and a bit-error rate below the KP4 forward-error correction threshold of 2.4×10−4
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 25308-25317 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Optics Express |
Volume | 30 |
Issue number | 14 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 4 Jul 2022 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics