High-speed optical modulation based on carrier depletion in a silicon waveguide.

By Ansheng Liu, L. Liao, D. Rubin, Hat Nguyen, B. Ciftcioglu, Y. Chetrit, N. Izhaky, Mario Paniccia. Optics Express, 2007

681 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a high-speed and highly scalable silicon optical modulator based on the free carrier plasma dispersion effect. The fast refractive index modulation of the device is due to electric-field-induced carrier depletion in a Silicon-on-Insulator waveguide containing a reverse biased pn junction. To achieve high-speed performance, a travelling-wave design is used to allow co-propagation of electrical and optical signals along the waveguide. We demonstrate high-frequency modulator optical response with 3 dB bandwidth of ~20 GHz and data transmission up to 30 Gb/s. Such high-speed data transmission capability will enable silicon modulators to be one of the key building blocks for integrated silicon photonic chips for next generation communication networks as well as future high performance computing applications.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b87dbe1c1ebd706c3ad7dcb8ad58c320da9b3ed1

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Citations in the corpus

Silicon photonic devices and integrated circuits (2014, neutral): “Recently, high data rates of 30–50 Gb/s have been demonstrated using carrier depletion [35–40].”
High-speed modulation of a compact silicon ring resonator (2009, background): “High speed modulation in free carrier depleted silicon-based modulators was demonstrated theoretically by [2,3] and experimentally by [4-8], to operate in the multiGHz regime Two of the compulsory functions within any on-chip optical network include the electrical modulation of an optical carrier at”
Silicon Modulators and Germanium Photodetectors on SOI: Monolithic Integration, Compatibility, and Performance Optimization (2010, background): “There have been several reports on Si modulators based on the free-carrier plasma dispersion effect [3]–[15].”
Monolithic germanium/silicon avalanche photodiodes with 340 GHz gain-bandwidth product (2009, methodology): “This procedure, followed by continuous or cyclic thermal treatment, has been demonstrated as an efficient way to reduce defect density inside germanium epilayer”
Silicon optical modulators (2010, methodology): “Further to this a plethora of carrier depletion based modulators compatible with data transmission at speeds of at least 10 Gb/s were demonstrated [23-25, 66- 73]; but the device from Liu et al. [39] is still the fastest silicon modulator reported to date.”
High Speed Carrier Injection 18 Gb/s Silicon Micro-ring Electro-optic Modulator (2007, neutral): “The electrical structure has been either a p-i-n diode in injection mode [1, 3, 5, and 6] , a PN diode in depletion mode [4, 7] or a MOS capacitor [2].”
Taking silicon photonics modulators to a higher performance level: state-of-the-art and a review of new technologies (2021, neutral): “27 Typically, plasma dispersion modulators rely on interferometric structures [such as the Mach – Zehnder interferometer (MZI) 13,19,78,84,108,118 or optical cavities 9,12,32,33,100,115 ] for the translation of phase modulation into amplitude modulation.”
Recent breakthroughs in carrier depletion based silicon optical modulators (2014, methodology): “The first proposed [18] and demonstrated [19] waveguide based carrier depletion modulators were of this type.”
Waveguide-integrated, ultralow-energy GeSi electro-absorption modulators (2008, background): “Table 1 summarizes the active device area, the total footprint on c-Si, dynamic driving voltage V pp , energy consumption per bit, and the operating spectrum width of a silicon Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI”