Journal
LIGHT-SCIENCE & APPLICATIONS
Volume 4, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/lsa.2015.28
Keywords
electro-optic materials; electro-optic modulation; nonlinear organic materials; silicon-organic hybrid
Categories
Funding
- European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant 'EnTeraPIC') [280145]
- Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation
- Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association
- DFG Center for Functional Nanostructures
- Karlsruhe International Research School on Teratronics
- Karlsruhe School of Optics and Photonics
- Karlsruhe Nano-Micro Facility
- DFG Major Research Instrumentation Programme
- EU-FP7 project PHOXTROT
- EU-FP7 project BigPIPES
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Open Access Publishing Fund of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
- National Science Foundation [DMR-0905686, DMR-0120967]
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research [FA9550-09-1-0682]
- Division Of Materials Research
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [1303080] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Energy-efficient electro-optic modulators are at the heart of short-reach optical interconnects, and silicon photonics is considered the leading technology for realizing such devices. However, the performance of all-silicon devices is limited by intrinsic material properties. In particular, the absence of linear electro-optic effects in silicon renders the integration of energy-efficient photonic-electronic interfaces challenging. Silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) integration can overcome these limitations by combining nanophotonic silicon waveguides with organic cladding materials, thereby offering the prospect of designing optical properties by molecular engineering. In this paper, we demonstrate an SOH Mach-Zehnder modulator with unprecedented efficiency: the 1-mm-long device consumes only 0.7 fJ bit(-1) to generate a 12.5 Gbit s(-1) data stream with a bit-error ratio below the threshold for hard-decision forward-error correction. This power consumption represents the lowest value demonstrated for a non-resonant Mach-Zehnder modulator in any material system. It is enabled by a novel class of organic electro-optic materials that are designed for high chromophore density and enhanced molecular orientation. The device features an electro-optic coefficient of r(33) approximate to 180 pm V-1 and can be operated at data rates of up to 40 Gbit s(-1).
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