Ultra-high-linearity integrated lithium niobate electro-optic modulators

TL;DR

This paper presents a monolithic integrated lithium niobate electro-optic modulator with ultrahigh linearity and a record SFDR of 120.04 dB Hz4/5 at 1 GHz, enabling advanced microwave photonic systems.

Contribution

The work introduces a highly linear LN modulator with optimized linearization, achieving significant suppression of distortion without active feedback, surpassing previous thin-film LN results.

Findings

Achieved SFDR of 120.04 dB Hz4/5 at 1 GHz

Suppressed third-order intermodulation distortions by ~20 dB

Demonstrated potential for large-scale microwave photonic integration

Abstract

Integrated lithium niobate (LN) photonics is a promising platform for future chip-scale microwave photonics systems owing to its unique electro-optic properties, low optical loss and excellent scalability. A key enabler for such systems is a highly linear electro-optic modulator that could faithfully covert analog electrical signals into optical signals. In this work, we demonstrate a monolithic integrated LN modulator with an ultrahigh spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of 120.04 dB Hz4/5 at 1 GHz, using a ring-assisted Mach-Zehnder interferometer configuration. The excellent synergy between the intrinsically linear electro-optic response of LN and an optimized linearization strategy allows us to fully suppress the cubic terms of third-order intermodulation distortions (IMD3) without active feedback controls, leading to ~ 20 dB improvement over previous results in the thin-film LN platform. Our ultra-high-linearity LN modulators could become a core building block for future large-scale functional microwave photonic integrated circuits, by further integration with other high-performance components like low-loss delay lines, tunable filters and phase shifters available on the LN platform.