Abstract
The article below presents a review of current research on silicon photonics. Herein, an overview of current silicon modulator types and modern integration approaches is presented including direct bonding methods and micro-transfer printing. An analysis of current state of the art silicon modulators is also given. Finally, new prospects for III–V-silicon integration are explored and the prospects of an integrated modulator compatible with current CMOS processing is investigated.
Highlights
The presence of photonics in communications was spawned from the limitations of electrical communications and as the industry becomes more established optical technology is poised to be at the forefront of short-reach interconnects
The III–V epitaxial structure is grown with a thin sacrificial release layer which can be etched away at the completion of the III–V processing steps allowing the manipulation of micron-sized thin films devices on coupon structures, such that they can be printed in a massively parallel way to the designated target substrate such as Silicon and patterned Silicon on Insulator (SOI)
Kock et al has demonstrated the monolithic integration of plasmonic Mach-Zehnder Modulators (MZM) on the silicon platform via a bipolar Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) (BiCMOS) technology which has been shown to be capable of achieving high-speed data transmission, with symbol rates surpassing 100 GBd on a footprint of 29 × 6 μm2 [85]
Summary
The presence of photonics in communications was spawned from the limitations of electrical communications and as the industry becomes more established optical technology is poised to be at the forefront of short-reach interconnects. High speed modulation has been demonstrated many times over with ring resonators via shifting the carrier density of the material, changing the refractive index [16], and the resonance wavelength through the application of an external voltage to the device’s PN junction [8,17]. Silicon optical modulators based on carrier dispersion effects typically use a PIN or PN diode structure across the optical waveguide to alter the density of free carriers available to interact with light within the guide [30]. Both can be made on a semiconductor waveguide, forward bias producing photons and reverse bias absorbing them This makes creating an effective pure silicon EAM incredibly challenging due to silicon’s indirect bandgap. 3 dB modulation depth was achieved at 6 Vpp from 1542 to 1558 nm for EAMs with length 500 μm
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