Ring-assisted Mach-Zehnder interferometer silicon modulator for enhanced performance

[EN] A high-speed ring-assisted Mach-Zehnder interferometer (RAMZI) silicon modulator is reported and experimentally demonstrated. The RAMZI optical structure relaxes the optimum coupling condition of the ring without degrading the modulator performance, which therefore improves the modulator robustness against fabrication deviations and could eventually lead to an enhanced modulation bandwidth. Hence, our RAMZI silicon modulator, based on carrier depletion in a pipin active structure, exhibits a 3 dB electro-optical bandwidth of 19 GHz, enabling up to 20 Gbit/s data transmission over a RF/optical interaction length of only similar to 200 mu m.This work was supported in part by the European Commission under project HELIOS (pHotonics Electronics functional Integration on CMOS), FP7-224312. The work of P. Sanchis and J. Marti was supported in part by the R&D Excellency Program (NANOMET) under Grant TEC2008-06360 DEMOTEC, Grant TEC2008-06333 SINADEC, and Grant PROMETEO-2010-087. The work of D. Marris-Morini and L. Vivien was supported in part by the French ANR under project SILVER.Brimont, ACJ.; Gutiérrez Campo, AM.; Rasigade, G.; Ziebell, M.; Marris-Morini, D.; Fedeli, JM.; Vivien, L.... (2012). Ring-assisted Mach-Zehnder interferometer silicon modulator for enhanced performance. Journal of Lightwave Technology. 30(1):9-14. https://doi.org/10.1109/JLT.2011.2176314S91430