Silicon rich nitride-lithium niobate on insulator platform for photonics integrated circuits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel SRN-LNOI hybrid platform combining silicon rich nitride and lithium niobate on insulator, enabling low-loss, high-density integrated photonic devices with high-speed modulation capabilities.

Contribution

It presents the design and demonstration of a new hybrid platform with key passive and active photonic components, including high-speed modulators up to 120 GBaud.

Findings

Waveguide loss of 2.6 dB/cm at 1550 nm

Successful fabrication of various passive devices

High-speed Mach-Zehnder modulators demonstrated

Abstract

In this paper, a silicon rich nitride-lithium niobate on insulator (SRN-LNOI) hybrid platform with waveguides and several key components is proposed. The propagation loss of the silicon rich nitride-lithium niobate rib-loaded waveguide (1 um x 300 nm) is 2.6 dB/cm at 1550 nm. Passive devices, including adiabatic power splitters, multimode interferometer based splitters, asymmetrical Mach-Zehnder interferometers and Bragg grating filters are fully designed and characterized. Moreover, we report the first demonstration of Mach-Zehnder modulators based on LNOI with high-speed modulation up to 120 GBaud without digital compensation. Hence, the proposed platform enables high performance passive and active devices with low loss, high integration density and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology (CMOS) compatibility, making it a promising candidate for emerging photonics integrated circuits.