High-performance hybrid silicon and lithium niobate Mach–Zehnder modulators for 100 Gbit s−1 and beyond

By Mingbo He, Mengyue Xu, Yuxuan Ren, Jian Jian, Ziliang Ruan, Yongsheng Xu, Shengqian Gao, Shihao Sun, Xueqin Wen, Lidan Zhou and 6 more. Nature Photonics, 2018

928 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Optical modulators are at the heart of optical communication links. Ideally, they should feature low loss, low drive voltage, large bandwidth, high linearity, compact footprint and low manufacturing cost. Unfortunately, these criteria have been achieved only on separate occasions. Based on a silicon and lithium niobate hybrid integration platform, we demonstrate Mach–Zehnder modulators that simultaneously fulfil these criteria. The presented device exhibits an insertion loss of 2.5 dB, voltage–length product of 2.2 V cm in single-drive push–pull operation, high linearity, electro-optic bandwidth of at least 70 GHz and modulation rates up to 112 Gbit s−1. The high-performance modulator is realized by seamless integration of a high-contrast waveguide based on lithium niobate—a popular modulator material—with compact, low-loss silicon circuitry. The hybrid platform demonstrated here allows for the combination of ‘best-in-breed’ active and passive components, opening up new avenues for future high-speed, energy-efficient and cost-effective optical communication networks.Low-loss, high-speed and efficient optical modulators on a silicon platform are demonstrated.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f08919b15023cd47dd4339369def857abdf579ce

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Citations in the corpus

On‐Chip Integrated Waveguide Amplifiers on Erbium‐Doped Thin‐Film Lithium Niobate on Insulator (2021, methodology): “Significant progresses in the design and fabrication of passive photonic components based on TFLNOI have been made towards both scientific and technical applications including nonlinear frequency conversion, high-speed integrated modulator, quantum information technology, microwave photonics, freque”
Taking silicon photonics modulators to a higher performance level: state-of-the-art and a review of new technologies (2021, background): “dous boost in the speeds (not yet the overall performance) of such modulators has been reported.(173,174) For example, for a”
Integrated electro-optics on thin-film lithium niobate (2024, positive): “This device leverages the interference between two paths that light can take to exert control over the amplitude of light 1,4,5,52 .”
Advances in lithium niobate photonics: development status and perspectives (2022, background): “Therefore, Pockels effect-based linear LN modulators can achieve higher modulation speeds.(31,52) Therefore, LN-based modulators are widely used in current fiber-optical communication systems.”