Advancing all Silicon MOSCAP Ring Modulators with Ultra-thin sub-5 nm Insulator

Abstract

We demonstrate silicon/SiO ₂/polysilicon lateral MOS-Capacitor (MOSCAP) RRM operating above 50 GHz with modulation amplitude enhanced by a large plasma absorption within the MOS junction. A MOSCAP ring resonator modulator (RRM) model has been built using Lumerical software, in which the plasma effect is defined by adopting a reported superlinear rather than linear plasma absorption equation, which aligns well with our experimental results. The performance of the MOSCAP RRMs has been analyzed with different thicknesses of insulator oxide (t _ox). The modulation performance is enhanced with thinner t _ox down to 3 nm, giving a lower insertion loss and larger optical modulation amplitude (OMA) when benchmarked with a conventional depletion type RRM with a low V _πL of 2.6-4.0 V·mm under a bias voltage V _b 0-3 V. High-speed operation of the MOSCAP RRM with radius 15 μm demonstrated an average power insertion loss (IL _ave) of 3.5dB and one level insertion loss (IL _one) of 2dB for achieving a 3dB dynamic ER at a data rate of 30 Gb/s and bit-error-rate (BER) < 1 ×10 ^-12. The same performance is possible at 50 Gb/s when feed-forward-equalization is enabled on the detection side. We also show the possibility of operating at 224 Gb/s using 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) for a MOSCAP RRM incorporating two active segments. The MOSCAP RRM provides an attractive solution to surpass the performance of the conventional depletion-type RRM, for which future performance scaling is limited with increased doping density towards 1 ×10 ¹⁹cm ^-3.

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