High-Bandwidth Lumped Mach-Zehnder Modulators Based on Thin-Film Lithium Niobate

• DOI: 10.3390/photonics11050399
• Publication Date: 2024-04-26T09:13:41Z
• Authors: Peng Yang; Siwei Sun; Yuqiang Zhang; Rui Cao; Huimin He; Haiyun Xue; Fengman Liu
• Keywords: 0303 health sciences; 03 medical and health sciences; lumped; Mach-Zehnder modulators; capacitively−loaded lumped electrodes; lithium niobate; Applied optics. Photonics; TA1501-1820

Recently, lumped Mach-Zehnder Modulators (MZMs) have received renewed attention due to their potential for low power consumption and compact size. However, the practicality of MZMs with conventional electrodes (C−LEs) is limited by lower electro−optical (EO) bandwidth. The reduction in EO bandwidth results from inherent trade−off between half−wave voltage length product (VπL) within C−LE architecture. This paper proposes a thin−film lithium niobate (TFLN)−based MZM capacitively−loaded (CL−LEs). purely linear effect LN eliminates parasitic capacitance doped PN junction enhances Furthermore, CL−LE structure can break limitation VπL design. Simulations show proposed device achieves high 32.4 GHz 1.15 V·cm. Due reduced VπL, as 0.1 pJ/bit. Simulation indicate that open−eye diagrams are achieved at 64 Gb/s 1.5 mm TFLN MZM, an ER 2.97 dB. Consequently, architecture substantially performance MZMs, showing promise application short−reach optical interconnects data centers.