Wide Spectral Characteristics of Si Photonic Crystal Mach-Zehnder Modulator Fabricated by Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Process

Optical modulators for optical interconnects require a small size, small voltage, high speed and wide working spectrum. For this purpose, we developed Si slow-light Mach-Zehnder modulators via a 180 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process. We employed 200 μm lattice-shifted photonic crystal waveguides with interleaved p-n junctions as phase shifters. The group index spectrum of slow light was almost flat at ng ≈ 20 but exhibited ±10% fluctuation over a wavelength bandwidth of 20 nm. The cutoff frequency measured in this bandwidth ranged from 15 to 20 GHz; thus, clear open eyes were observed in the 25 Gbps modulation. However, the fluctuation in ng was reflected in the extinction ratio and bit-error rate. For a stable error-free operation, a 1 dB margin is necessary in the extinction ratio. In addition, we constructed a device with varied values of ng and confirmed that the extinction ratio at this speed was enhanced by larger ng up to 60. However, this larger ng reduced the cutoff frequency because of increased phase mismatch between slow light and radio frequency signals. Therefore, ng available for 25 Gbps modulation is limited to up to 40 for the current device design