Sub-Volt Silicon-Organic Electrooptic Modulator

Lowering the operating voltage of electrooptic modulators is desirable for a variety of applications, most notably in analog photonics , and digital data communications . In particular for digital systems such as CPUs, it is desirable to develop modulators that are both temperature-insensitive and compatible with typically sub-2V CMOS electronics ; however, drive voltages in silicon-based MZIs currently exceed 6.5V . Here we show an MZI modulator based on an electrooptic polymer-clad silicon slot waveguide, with a halfwave voltage of only 0.69V, and a bandwidth of 500 MHz. We also show that there are also paths to significantly improve both the bandwidth and drive voltage . Our silicon-organic modulator has an intrinsic power consumption less than 0.66 pJ/bit, nearly an order of magnitude improvement over the previous lowest energy silicon MZI .

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