Silicon high speed modulator for advanced modulation: device structures and exemplary modulator performance

Abstract

Fiber optics is well established today due to the high capacity and speed, unrivaled flexibility and quality of service. However, state of the art optical elements and components are hardly scalable in terms of cost and size required to achieve competitive port density and cost per bit. Next-generation high-speed coherent optical communication systems targeting a data rate of 100-Gb/s and beyond goes along with innovations in component and subsystem areas. Consequently, by leveraging the advanced silicon micro and nano-fabrication technologies, significant progress in developing CMOS platform-based silicon photonic devices has been made all over the world. These achievements include the demonstration of high-speed IQ modulators, which are important building blocks in coherent optical communication systems. In this paper, we demonstrate silicon photonic QPSK modulator based on a metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) capacitor structure, address different modulator configuration structures and report our progress and research associated with highspeed advanced optical modulation in silicon photonics