Sub-Volt Silicon-Organic Electrooptic Modulator

TL;DR

This paper presents a silicon-organic electrooptic modulator with a sub-volt drive voltage, high bandwidth, and low power consumption, advancing the development of energy-efficient, CMOS-compatible optical modulators for digital and analog applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces a silicon-organic electrooptic modulator with a record low halfwave voltage of 0.69V and high bandwidth, demonstrating significant improvements over existing silicon modulators.

Findings

Halfwave voltage of 0.69V

Bandwidth of 500 MHz

Power consumption less than 0.66 pJ/bit

Abstract

Lowering the operating voltage of electrooptic modulators is desirable for a variety of applications, most notably in analog photonics , and digital data communications . In particular for digital systems such as CPUs, it is desirable to develop modulators that are both temperature-insensitive and compatible with typically sub-2V CMOS electronics ; however, drive voltages in silicon-based MZIs currently exceed 6.5V . Here we show an MZI modulator based on an electrooptic polymer-clad silicon slot waveguide, with a halfwave voltage of only 0.69V, and a bandwidth of 500 MHz. We also show that there are also paths to significantly improve both the bandwidth and drive voltage . Our silicon-organic modulator has an intrinsic power consumption less than 0.66 pJ/bit, nearly an order of magnitude improvement over the previous lowest energy silicon MZI .