Slow-light silicon modulator with 110-GHz bandwidth

Abstract

Silicon modulators are key components to support the dense integration of electro-optic functional elements for various applications. Despite numerous advances in promoting the modulation speed, a bandwidth ceiling emerges in practices and becomes an obstacle toward Tbps-level throughput on a single chip. Here, we demonstrate a compact pure silicon modulator that shatters present bandwidth ceiling to 110 gigahertz. The proposed modulator is built on a cascade corrugated waveguide architecture, which gives rise to a slow-light effect. By comprehensively balancing a series of merits, the modulators can benefit from the slow light for better efficiency and compact size while remaining sufficiently high bandwidth. Consequently, we realize a 110-gigahertz modulator with 124-micrometer length, enabling 112 gigabits per second on-off keying operation. Our work proves that silicon modulators with 110 gigahertz are feasible, thus shedding light on its potentials in ultrahigh bandwidth applications such as optical interconnection and photonic machine learning.

Scalable On-Chip Optoelectronic Ising Machine Utilizing Thin-Film Lithium Niobate Photonics

“…An operation latency of ∼370 μs was also achieved in the Scheme II demonstration with a 16,384-spin checkerboard graph. This value is predicted to decrease to ∼2.14 μs, provided that the optical modulator, , PDs, and the ADC/DAC supporting a 100 Gbaud signal are utilized in the demonstration of scheme II (refer to the third row of Table ).…”

“…However, high-speed optoelectronic devices enable the realization of large-scale optical computation with high computing throughput, even though the number of spatially integrated photonic/optoelectronic elements is significantly lower than that of the electronic elements. As an instance shown in Figure b, based in Scheme II presented in Section Demonstration of Scheme II, deploying 4 sets of parallel high-speed MZMs , and PDs (e.g., 100 GHz bandwidth) can yield competitive high computing speeds (e.g., 400 × 10 9 multiplications per second) for large-scale MVMs within the Ising calculations. This stands in contrast to the electronic scheme depicted in Figure a, which employs large-scale SDM elements at a relatively low computational clock rate.…”

Sidewall Corrugation-Modulated Phase-Apodized Silicon Grating Filter

“…Waveguide grating is more beneficial to realize on-chip integrated optics, which can reflect a specific wavelength to its input port and be used as a band-stop filter in forward transmission and a band-pass filter at the reflecting port. It has been widely used in optical filters [ 4 ], high-speed modulators [ 5 ], semiconductor lasers [ 6 ], optical sensing [ 7 ], wavelength-division-multiplexing devices [ 8 ], and so on. The subwavelength grating waveguides can be also regarded as types of metamaterials with an engineerable index, mode, and dispersion response [ 9 ].…”

Inert Gas Element as Active Infrared‐Absorption Source and Donor in Silicon for Forbidden‐Wavelength Sensing

“…Silicon (Si) based optoelectronics is at the heart of the optoelectronic industry owing to its unique ability for Si device integration. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Among them, photodetectors working at infrared by a Si detector at the IR communication wavelength. However, such results are counterintuitive at first glance for the reasons below.…”

“…Silicon (Si) based optoelectronics is at the heart of the optoelectronic industry owing to its unique ability for Si device integration. [ 1–9 ] Among them, photodetectors working at infrared (IR) communication wavelength (λ) of 1.31/1.55 µm are particularly important. [ 10,11 ] However, due to the well‐known problem of low absorption at λ ≥ 1.1 µm, corresponding to its bandgap, Si is not a candidate for communication applications.…”