Abstract
Silicon modulators, which use the free-carrier-plasma effect, were studied, both analytically and experimentally. It was demonstrated that the loss-efficiency product, a-VpL, was a suitable figure of merit for silicon modulators that enabled their intrinsic properties to be compared. Subsequently, the dependence of VpL on frequency was expressed by using the electrical parameters of a phase shifter when the modulator was operated by assuming a simple driving configuration. A diode-based modulator operated in forward biased mode was expected from analyses to provide more efficient operation than that in reversed mode at high frequencies due to its large capacitance. We obtained an a-VpL of 9.5 dB-V at 12.5 GHz in experiments by using the fabricated phase shifter with pin diodes operated in forward biased mode. This a-VpL was comparable to the best modulators operated in depletion mode. The modulator exhibited a clear eye opening at 56 Gb/s operated by 2 V peak-to-peak signals that was achieved by incorporating such a phase shifter into a ring resonator.
Highlights
Total transmission capacity urgently needs to be scaled up for transceivers in optical fiber communications [1,2,3,4,5]
We found that the loss-efficiency product, α · Vπ L [28], at a given operating frequency was a suitable figure of merit (FOM) for silicon modulators to enable their intrinsic characteristics to be compared
We investigated silicon modulators that utilize the free-carrier plasma (FCP) effect
Summary
Total transmission capacity urgently needs to be scaled up for transceivers in optical fiber communications [1,2,3,4,5]. Various kinds of modulators have been proposed and demonstrated, far [3, 6, 8, 9, 15, 19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40] Those using the free-carrier plasma (FCP) effect [41] are suitable for integrated transceivers because they are made with materials and by processes that are compatible with those of standard silicon electronic devices. Modulators that are superior in terms of fundamental performance should be chosen to meet the requirements of continuously increasing data rates of transceivers They should be chosen to provide a specific optical modulation amplitude (OMA) at a given operating speed using the smallest driving voltage and footprint. We conducted experiments on 56-Gb/s large-signal modulation by using the modulators we fabricated based on a ring resonator
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