Low Voltage Silicon Photonic Modulators

Silicon photonics may be a compact integration platform to implement power-efficient and high-bandwidth optical transceivers/transponders. Low-power silicon electro-optic modulators are crucial to achieve this goal. We review recently reported energy-efficient and high-speed silicon photonic modulators. 1. Introduction Information bandwidth demands have continuously grown for many years and are expected to do so in the future. Today's information society relies to broadband communication and computation. Optical fiber communications are not only booming in long-reach telecomm applications, but also replacing copper interconnects in shorter and shorter communications such as in supercomputers. High bandwidths and high energy efficiencies are required to fulfill the increasing bandwidth demands while still keeping low power consumption for information infrastructures. Silicon-photonics based optoelectronic devices are very promising to provide high-bandwidth communications with low cost and low power consumption. In an optical transceiver/transponder, a significant portion of the power consumption comes from the electro-optic modulator and its electronic driver. Low-voltage silicon modulators could greatly reduce the power consumption. However, the small refractive index change from the weak electro-optic effect of silicon poses significant challenges to develop low-voltage silicon modulators. In this talk, we review recently reported high-performance silicon photonic modulators to pursuits this goal.