Plasmonic Ferroelectric Modulator Monolithically Integrated on SiN for 216 GBd Data Transmission
Manuel Kohli, Daniel Chelladurai, Andreas Messner, Yannik Horst, David Moor, Joel Winiger, Tobias Blatter, T. Buriakova, Clarissa Convertino, Felix Eltes, M. Zervas, Yuriy Fedoryshyn, Ueli Koch, Juerg Leuthold
Abstract
A high-speed plasmonic barium titanate (BTO, BaTiO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sub> ) Mach-Zehnder modulator is presented. We combine nanoscale plasmonics with BTO as solid-state active material and silicon nitride (SiN) for versatile and low loss waveguiding, and integrate them in a monolithic platform. We demonstrate a plasmonic BTO modulator processed onto foundry-produced SiN. The 15 µm long high-speed modulator features a flat electro-optic frequency response up to 70 GHz and is expected to be flat way beyond. A low V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">π</sub> L product of 144 Vµm is shown. Data experiments reaching 216 Gbit/s with a 216 GBd 2PAM signal and 256 Gbit/s with a 128 GBd 4PAM signal are demonstrated. The merger of the versatile silicon nitride platform with high-speed plasmonics using the highly nonlinear ferroelectric BTO is an attractive solution as a future Tb/s optical interconnect platform.