Demonstration of long-term thermally stable silicon-organic hybrid modulators at 85 °C

Abstract

We report on the first demonstration of long-term thermally stable silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) modulators in accordance with Telcordia standards for high-temperature storage. The devices rely on an organic electro-optic sidechain polymer with a high glass transition temperature of 172 °C. In our high-temperature storage experiments at 85 °C, we find that the electro-optic activity converges to a constant long-term stable level after an initial decay. If we consider a burn-in time of 300 h, the π-voltage of the modulators increases on average by less than 15% if we store the devices for an additional 2400 h. The performance of the devices is demonstrated by generating high-quality 40 Gbit/s OOK signals both after the burn-in period and after extended high-temperature storage.

High-temperature-resistant silicon-polymer hybrid modulator operating at up to 200 Gbit s−1 for energy-efficient datacentres and harsh-environment applications

“…However, these features come at the cost of millimetre dimensions. In contrast, with device architectures based on a silicon slot waveguide 34 , 35 , 52 , 53 or a metal–insulator–metal plasmonic slot waveguide 23 – 28 , which are deployed in SOH and POH modulators, both optical and electrical fields could be tightly confined into nanoscopic dimensions with enhanced nonlinearities and concentrated electrical field, thereby reducing the π-voltage–length product in EO modulators, and shrinking the footprint to sub-millimetre 54 , 55 or micrometre 23 – 28 scales. The waveguide architecture of our device could be further optimized to realize a more compact footprint, which is of utmost importance in view of future ultra-dense high-speed parallelized interconnects to facilitate dense modulator arrays 56 , 57 for space-division multiplexing applications, and enable advanced complex modulations on a more compact footprint for coherent communications 45 , 58 .…”

Taking silicon photonics modulators to a higher performance level: state-of-the-art and a review of new technologies

“…Recent years have seen growing efforts to integrate materials with strong electro-optic effects on SiPh platforms. [192][193][194][195][196][197][198][199][200][201][202][203][204][205][206][207][208]228 The integration of new materials provides routes for optically broadband and energy-efficient high-speed modulation with little or no current flow. 176,181,184,188,202 Furthermore, in some cases, these new materials provide an excellent decoupling between amplitude and phase modulation, which is difficult to achieve with contemporary all-silicon plasma dispersion modulation schemes.…”

“…Table 1 shows a rich landscape of SiPh modulators, where SiPh is incorporating a variety of other materials for implementing performant high-speed modulators. Modulation of amplitude by the Franz-Keldysh (FK) effect, 20,38,128,[133][134][135][136][137][138][139][140] quantum-confined Stark (QCS) effect, [141][142][143][144][145][146][147][148][149][150][151][152] and electrical gating, [153][154][155][156][157][158][159][160] or the modulation of phase by employing the plasma dispersion effect, [161][162][163][164][165][166] Pockels effect, [192][193][194][195][196][197][198][199][200] and inter-band transitions,…”

Silicon-organic hybrid photonics: Overview of recent advances, electro-optical effects and CMOS-integration concepts

“…For example, a cross-linkable EO system consisting of two chromophores (HLD 1 and HLD 2 ) has been demonstrated to maintain 99% of the initial r 33 after being heated to 85 • C for 500 h, making it a promising candidate for future SOH modulators [122]. Kieninger et al studied a random copolymer of four differently substituted methyl-methacrylate (MMA) moieties infiltrated into a silicon slot waveguide [119]. This polymer system was introduced in 2016 [123] and exhibits a donor-acceptorsubstituted phenyl vinylene thiophene (PVT) chromophore as a side group, which is responsible for the EO effect, while a bulky adamantyl side group increases the glass transition temperature.…”