It is essential to bias a thin-film lithium-niobate Mach-Zehnder electro-optic (EO) modulator at the desired operation condition to ensure optimal performance of the modulator. While thermo-optic (TO) control can solve the problem of bias drift, it consumes significant electric power. In this paper, we propose a technique to largely reduce bias power consumption by combining passive bias and TO bias. In our design, waveguide sections with different widths are introduced in the two arms of the MZ modulator to produce a desired phase difference of π/2 rad (the desired operation condition), and local heating with electrode heaters placed on the waveguides is employed to provide compensation for any phase drift caused by fabrication errors and other effects. As the TO control only serves to compensate for small errors, the electric power required is low and the response is fast. To demonstrate our technique experimentally, we fabricate several modulators of the same design on the same chip. Our experimental modulators can operate up to ∼40 GHz with a half-wave voltage of ∼2.0 V over a wide optical bandwidth, and the performances are insensitive to ambient temperature variations. The TO bias powers required range from 1 mW to 15 mW, and the thermal rise and fall times are 47 µs and 14 µs, respectively. Our technique can facilitate the development of practical high-speed EO modulators on the lithium-niobate-on-insulator platform.

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We propose a long-period grating assisted directional coupler in lithium niobate (LN) for the realization of electro-optic tunable mode filtering functionality. Our typical device, fabricated with the annealed proton-exchange process and designed for filtering out the fundamental mode in a two-mode LN waveguide, achieves a maximum mode extinction ratio of 29 dB at 1551.7 nm wavelength and a 20 dB bandwidth of ~2.5 nm with an electrical wavelength tuning sensitivity of 0.182 nm/V.

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We propose and demonstrate a broadband and lowrandom-phase-errors 22 optical switch on thin-film lithium niobate platform. The proposed switch is based on a typical Mach-Zehnder interferometer constructed with two 22 3-dB multimode interferometer couplers, two few-mode waveguide (FMW) arms, and corresponding input and output waveguides. The use of FMWs can help to reduce the random phase errors and improve the fabrication tolerances. Over a wide optical bandwidth from 1530 nm to 1605 nm, our typical fabricated switch can work on the desired initial operating state and achieve an extinction ratio mostly larger than ~16 dB. The switching voltage is ~7.3 V. The rise and fall times are 134.4 ns and 8.8 ns, respectively. This work can facilitate the development of optical switches on the lithiumniobate-insulator (LNOI) platform.