Improved extinction ratio of Mach-Zehnder based optical modulators on CMOS platform

Abstract

Silicon based optical modulators with improved extinction ratio (ER) of 25 dB were demonstrated on complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) platform. It was proposed that the effect of optical absorption due to free carriers accumulated in silicon should be considered in the analysis of device configuration. Experimental results presented in this study were identical with the proposed analyses. The modulators were operated with the data transmission rate of 3.2 Gbps.

Keywords

silicon photonics / optical modulator / extinction ratio (ER) / integration

References

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Program on Key Basic Research Project of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Nos. 2006CB302803 and 2011CB301701) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 60877036).

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg