A 1 V Peak-to-Peak Driven 10-Gbps Slow-Light Silicon Mach--Zehnder Modulator Using Cascaded Ring Resonators

Slow-light Mach–Zehnder modulators on a silicon-on-insulator substrate are examined in this paper. The phase shifter on each arm consists of ten cascaded ring resonators in an all-pass filter configuration, and this acts as a slow-light structure. Fabricated devices show seven-fold enhancement in modulation efficiency compared with that of a conventional modulator; this enhancement was due to the slow light. Large signal modulations of 10 Gbps have been obtained using a driving signal of only 1 V peak-to-peak.

[1]  Henry F. Taylor.  Enhanced electrooptic modulation efficiency utilizing slow-wave optical propagation , 1999 .

[2]  Steven G. Johnson,et al.  Photonic-crystal slow-light enhancement of nonlinear phase sensitivity , 2002 .

[3]  A. Leinse,et al.  A novel high-speed polymeric EO Modulator based on a combination of a microring resonator and an MZI , 2005, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[4]  Wei Jiang,et al.  80-micron interaction length silicon photonic crystal waveguide modulator , 2005 .

[5]  M. Morse,et al.  High speed silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator. , 2005, Optics express.

[6]  Juthika Basak,et al.  40 Gbit/s silicon optical modulator for highspeed applications , 2007 .

[7]  F. Xia,et al.  Ultracompact optical buffers on a silicon chip , 2007 .

[8]  Qianfan Xu,et al.  12.5 Gbit/s carrier-injection-based silicon micro-ring silicon modulators. , 2007, Optics express.

[9]  L. Sekaric,et al.  Ultra-compact, low RF power, 10 Gb/s silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator. , 2007, Optics express.

[10]  Masaya Notomi,et al.  Low power and fast electro-optic silicon modulator with lateral p-i-n embedded photonic crystal nanocavity. , 2009, Optics express.

[11]  David A. B. Miller,et al.  Device Requirements for Optical Interconnects to Silicon Chips , 2009, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[12]  Xuezhe Zheng,et al.  Low Vpp, ultralow-energy, compact, high-speed silicon electro-optic modulator. , 2009, Optics express.

[13]  Kun-Yii Tu,et al.  CMOS-Compatible Si-Ring-Assisted Mach–Zehnder Interferometer With Internal Bandwidth Equalization , 2010, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics.

[14]  M. Watts,et al.  Low-Voltage, Compact, Depletion-Mode, Silicon Mach–Zehnder Modulator , 2010, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics.