Slow light enhanced carrier depletion modulators with 1V drive voltage

Brimont, A., Thomson, D. J., Herrera, J., Gardes, F., Reed, G. T., Fedeli, J.M., Martí, J. and Sanchis, P. (2012) Slow light enhanced carrier depletion modulators with 1V drive voltage. In Silicon Photonics and Photonic Integrated Circuits III. vol. 8431, SPIE. 7 pp . (doi:10.1117/12.922710).

Abstract

Slow light optical modulators are attracting ever more attention in the field of silicon photonics owing to their capacity to shrink the footprint of conventional rib waveguide based carrier depletion modulators while maintaining similar drive voltages. Nonetheless, the integration of future photonics components with advanced complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) electronics will require drive voltages as low as 1V. Here, we demonstrate that the use of slow light provides an attractive solution to reduce the driving power of carrier depletion-based Mach-Zehnder modulators so that they fulfill the consumption requirements of future CMOS electro-photonics transceivers. Preliminary characterization results show that our 1mm-long slow light device features a data transmission rate of 5 Gbit/s with ∼5.7 dB extinction ratio under a 1V drive voltage with 12dB insertion loss. Further measurements show that higher transmission speeds are achievable while sustaining the drive voltage close to current CMOS requirements.

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Contributors

Author: F. Gardes

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