High Performance Optical Modulator Based on Electro-Optic Polymer Filled Silicon Slot Photonic Crystal Waveguide

Silicon-organic hybrid integrated devices have emerging applications ranging from high-speed optical interconnects to photonic electromagnetic-field sensors. Silicon slot photonic crystal waveguides (PCWs) filled with electro-optic (EO) polymers combine the slow-light effect in PCWs with the high polarizability of EO polymers, which promises the realization of high-performance optical modulators. In this paper, a high-speed, power-efficient, low-dispersion, and compact optical modulator based on an EO polymer filled silicon slot PCW is presented. Lattice-shifted PCWs are utilized to engineer the photonic band diagram and thus enable an 8 nm-wide low-dispersion spectrum range, which is over an order of magnitude wider than that in modulators based on non-band-engineered PCWs and ring-resonators. A small voltage-length product of Vπ × L = 0.282 V × mm measured at 100 KHz is achieved by slow-light enhancement, corresponding to an unprecedented record-high effective in-device EO coefficient (r33) of 1230 pm/V among silicon-organic hybrid modulators. Excluding the slow-light effect, the actual in-device r33 is estimated to be 98 pm/V. By engineering the RC time constant via silicon doping and also utilizing a backside gate technique, the 3-dB modulation bandwidth of the device is measured to be 15 GHz. In addition, the RF power consumption of the modulator is estimated to be 24 mW at 10 GHz, and the estimated energy consumption for potential digital modulations is approximately 94.4 fJ/bit at 10 Gb/s.

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