Breaking the bandwidth limit of a high-quality-factor ring modulator based on thin-film lithium niobate

Abstract

Growing global data traffic requires high-performance modulators with a compact size, a large bandwidth, a low optical loss, and a small power consumption. A careful trade-off among these parameters usually has to be made when designing such a device. Here, we propose and demonstrate an electro-optic ring modulator on the thin-film lithium niobate platform without compromising between any performances. The device exhibits a low on-chip loss of about 0.15 dB with a high intrinsic quality-factor (Q-factor) of 7.7 × 10 5 . Since a pure coupling modulation is employed, the photon lifetime is no longer a limiting factor for the modulation speed. A large electro-optic bandwidth is obtained without any roll-off up to 67 GHz. The device, with a footprint of 3.4 m m × 0.7 m m , also exhibits a low half-wave voltage of 1.75 V, corresponding to a half-wave voltage length product of 0.35 V ⋅ c m considering the 2-mm-long modulation section. Driverless data transmission up to 240 Gb/s is also demonstrated with a peak-to-peak driving voltage of 0.75 V.