Lithium niobate electro-optical modulator based on ion-cut wafer scale heterogeneous bonding on patterned SOI wafers
Zhuoyun Li, Yang Chen, Shuxiao Wang, Fan Xu, Qiang Xu, Jianmin Zhang, Qiannan Zhu, Wencheng Yue, Xin Ou, Yan Cai, Mingbin Yu
Abstract
This paper presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of a high-performance heterogeneous silicon on insulator (SOI)/thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) electro-optical modulator based on wafer-scale direct bonding followed by ion-cut technology. The SOI wafer has been processed by an 8 inch standard fabrication line and cut into 6 inch for direct bonding with TFLN. The hybrid SOI/LN electro-optical modulator operated at the wavelength of 1.55 μm is composed of couplers on the Si layer and a Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) structure on the LN layer. The fabricated device exhibits a stable value of the product of half-wave voltage and length ( V π L ) of around 2.9 V· cm . It shows a good low-frequency electro-optic response flatness and supports 96 Gbit/s data transmission for the NRZ format and 192 Gbit/s data transmission for the PAM-4 format.