An improved approach of optical loss measurement using photocurrent and optical transmission in an electroabsorption modulator

Abstract—We report an improved method to extract the optical absorption coefficient of a semiconductor electroabsorption mod-ulator. Only the transmission and photocurrent data are needed with this method. The method makes it possible to obtain the op-tical coupling efficiency between laser and modulator, photocur-rent conversion efficiency, and optical absorption coefficients from experimental data. Index Terms—Absorption process, electroabsorption modulator (EAM), optical loss, photocurrent