Integrated electro-optic modulators offer huge potential to meet communications and computations' rapidly growing bandwidth requirements. Devices based on silicon allow high-volume, low-cost CMOS fabrication, and co-integration with the CMOS circuits. They are promising candidates for mass-producible Tb/s-scale inter-rack and intra-rack interconnects. This talk will focus on our advancement of silicon-based optical modulators: (1) miniaturized all silicon MOSCAP modulators for co-packaged optics and its integration with low voltage drivers, allowing low optical power consumption of 2 pJ/bit. (2) Novel carrier absorption enhanced electro-optical modulation in MOSCAP ring resonators towards integration with ultra-low voltage (<1V) CMOS drivers; (3) Carrier depletion ring unity device for large scale and high bandwidth density error-free links; (4) Linear DC-Kerr effect dominated silicon modulators towards lidar and quantum applications.
High speed optical modulators are important for a number of applications served by silicon photonics. Here we present our recent work towards high speed free carrier accumulation based optical modulators where a high speed and efficient operation is achieved. Such silicon optical modulators typically need to be built in sub-micrometre sized waveguides which are challenging to couple light to and from. Also presented are experimental results from a buried 3D-taper that is able to couple efficiently between a waveguide of height ~1.5um and a 220nm high waveguide. Losses below 0.6dB are achieved limited by the loss of the material used.
The silicon optical modulator is a key component in a high speed optical data link. To advance the modulator performance beyond the popular carrier depletion based devices, we have produced a capacitive device which is instead based upon the accumulation of free carriers either side of a thin insulating layer positioned in the middle of the waveguide. Such a device has a superior efficiency compared with the carrier depletion approach allowing compactness and improved power consumption whilst retaining high speed operation and CMOS compatibility.
The interest in developing high-performance optical modulator to meet the growing demands of data processing speed has increased over the last decade. While there have been significant research efforts in developing standalone silicon modulators, works on integrating those with electronics is limited, which is necessary for the practical implementation of short-reach optical interconnects.
In contrast to previous work in the field where electronic–photonic integration was mostly limited to the physical coupling approach, we have introduced a new design philosophy, where photonics and electronics must be considered as a single integrated system in order to tackle the demanding technical challenges of this field.
In this work, I shall present our recent 100Gb/s silicon photonics transmitter, where photonic and electronic devices are co-designed synergistically in terms of device packaging, power efficiency, operation speed, footprint and modulation format.
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