110 GHz CMOS compatible thin film LiNbO3 modulator on silicon

In this paper we address a significant limitation of silicon as an optical material, namely, the upper bound of its potential modulation frequency. This arises due to finite carrier mobility, which fundamentally limits the frequency response of all-silicon modulators to about 60 GHz. To overcome thi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Optics express 2016-07, Vol.24 (14), p.15590-15595
Main Authors: Mercante, Andrew J, Yao, Peng, Shi, Shouyuan, Schneider, Garrett, Murakowski, Janusz, Prather, Dennis W
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:In this paper we address a significant limitation of silicon as an optical material, namely, the upper bound of its potential modulation frequency. This arises due to finite carrier mobility, which fundamentally limits the frequency response of all-silicon modulators to about 60 GHz. To overcome this limitation, another material must be integrated with silicon to provide increased operational bandwidths. Accordingly, this paper proposes and demonstrates the integration of a thin LiNbO device layer with silicon and a novel tuning process that matches the propagation velocities between the propagating radio-frequency (RF) and optical waves. The resulting lithium niobate on silicon (LiNOS) modulator is demonstrated to operate from DC to 110 GHz.
ISSN:1094-4087
1094-4087
DOI:10.1364/OE.24.015590