A novel silicon forward-biased PIN Mach-Zehnder modulator with two operating states

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrated a silicon forward-biased positive intrinsic negative (PIN) Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM), which has two operating states of high efficiency and high speed. The two operating states are switched by changing the position where the electric signal is loaded. The modulator incorporates a PIN phase shifter integrated with the passive resistance and capacitance (RC) equalizer (PIN-RC), which expands the electro-optic (E-O) bandwidth by equalizing it with modulation efficiency. The fabricated modulator exhibited a low insertion loss of 1.29 dB in two operating states, and a compact design with a phase shifter length of 500 μm. The modulation efficiencies are 0.0088 V·cm and 1.43 V·cm, and the corresponding 3 dB E-O bandwidths are 200 MHz and 7 GHz, respectively. The high-speed modulation performance of the modulator was confirmed by non-return-to-zero (NRZ) modulation with a data rate of 15 Gbps without any pre-emphasis or post-processing. The presented modulator has great potential in optical computing, high-speed data transmission, and high-performance optical switch arrays.