The plasmonic BTO-on-SiN platform - beyond 200 GBd modulation for optical communications

Area of Science:

• Integrated photonics
• Materials science
• Optical communications

Background:

• High-speed modulators are crucial for AI and Tbit/s optical fiber communication.
• Existing platforms often struggle to balance low loss with high-speed modulation capabilities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and demonstrate a novel plasmonic BTO-on-SiN platform for high-speed electro-optic modulators.
• To leverage the combined advantages of silicon nitride (SiN) photonics and barium titanate (BTO) for enhanced modulator performance.

Main Methods:

• Integration of low-loss silicon nitride (SiN) with highly nonlinear barium titanate (BTO) on a single platform.
• Utilizing nanoscale plasmonics to enable miniaturized, high-speed modulator designs.
• Fabrication and testing of Mach-Zehnder (MZ), IQ, and racetrack (RT) modulators.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated electro-optical bandwidths up to 110 GHz with active lengths as short as 5 µm.
• Achieved record data rates of 448 Gbit/s with an IQ modulator and 340 Gbit/s with an MZ modulator.
• Introduced the first BTO IQ modulator on SiN and the first plasmonic RT modulator with BTO, operating efficiently in the O-band with 2 dB loss.

Conclusions:

• The plasmonic BTO-on-SiN platform offers a promising solution for next-generation high-speed optical modulators.
• This technology addresses the increasing demand for faster data transmission in optical communication and AI applications.
• The versatility of the SiN platform combined with BTO's nonlinear properties paves the way for future advancements in integrated photonics.