Silicon Photonic Crystal Modulators for High-Speed Transmission and Wavelength Division Multiplexing

For next-era optical interconnects in data centers, development of compact, energy-efficient, low-cost, and high-speed optical transceivers are required, for which high-performance external modulators in silicon photonics will be key components. We present a silicon photonic crystal waveguide slow light Mach-Zehnder modulator suitable for this purpose. The enhancement in the modulation efficiency via the slow light effect reduces the halfwave voltage-length product Vx03C0;L, maintaining a wide working spectrum over 15 nm. The frequency response of the slow light modulator is constricted by an electrooptic phase mismatch between slow light and RF signals. In this study, this was dramatically improved by matching the phase using meanderline electrodes that delay RF signals. The cutoff frequency was experimentally evaluated to be 32x2013;38 GHz. Using this device, we demonstrated high-speed modulation, including 64-Gbps on-off keying, 100-Gbps pulse amplitude modulation, and 50-Gbpsx002F;ch wavelength division multiplexing in 170x2013;200-x03BC;m- long devices.

对于数据中心的下一代光互连，需要开发紧凑、节能、低成本和高速的光收发器，而硅光子学中的高性能外调制器将是关键部件。我们提出了一种适用于此目的的硅光子晶体波导慢光马赫 - 曾德尔调制器。通过慢光效应提高调制效率，降低了半波电压 - 长度乘积VπL，在15纳米以上保持较宽的工作光谱。慢光调制器的频率响应受到慢光和射频信号之间电光相位失配的限制。在本研究中，通过使用弯曲电极延迟射频信号来匹配相位，极大地改善了这一情况。截止频率经实验评估为32 - 38吉赫兹。利用该器件，我们展示了高速调制，包括在170 - 200微米长的器件中实现64吉比特每秒的开关键控、100吉比特每秒的脉冲幅度调制以及50吉比特每秒/通道的波分复用。