Lithium Niobate Mach Zehnder Modulator Power Consumption Optimization by Modulator Designs and Titanium Diffusion Thickness Parameterizations

Abstract

The vast advantages of Mach Zehnder Modulator (MZM) have ignited the interest of many to explore more on its capability and improve on its limitation. Lithium Niobate (LiNbO <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</inf> ) is among the substrate that is preferred due to its stability at high temperature and its nonlinear effect. However, there are a lot of rooms to be explored on the power consumption. This paper is to investigate the waveguide structure designs and titanium diffusion thickness with low insertion loss (IL) and high extinction ratio (ER) which resulted in low power consumption. The rib area, arm length, the thickness of the titanium, length of I <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">z</inf> and I <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">x</inf> of the MZM were varied to get the optimum design. The analysis has been done using OptiBPM software. The best performance of MZM in this paper is with 3.2 V switching voltage, IL is less than 0.2 dB and ER is 37.9 dB. With low switching voltage, the power required by this modulator also low but still can provide low IL and high ER.