Journal
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 8, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-19061-8
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Funding
- European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant 'EnTeraPIC') [280145]
- EU FP7 project PhoxTroT
- EU FP7 project BigPipes
- Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation
- Helmholtz International Research School for Teratronics (HIRST)
- Karlsruhe School of Optics and Photonics (KSOP)
- Karlsruhe Nano-Micro Facility (KNMF)
- Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) under the Small Business Technology Transfer Research program (STTR) [FA8650-14-C-5005]
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) under the Small Business Technology Transfer Research program (STTR) [FA8650-14-C-5005]
- Keysight Technologies in Boeblingen, Germany
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Open Access Publishing Fund of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
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Electro-optic modulators for high-speed on-off keying (OOK) are key components of short-and medium-reach interconnects in data-center networks. Small footprint, cost-efficient large-scale production, small drive voltages and ultra-low power consumption are of paramount importance for such devices. Here we demonstrate that the concept of silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) integration perfectly meets these challenges. The approach combines the unique processing advantages of large-scale silicon photonics with unrivalled electro-optic (EO) coefficients obtained by molecular engineering of organic materials. Our proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate generation and transmission of OOK signals at line rates of up to 100 Gbit/s using a 1.1 mm-long SOH Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) featuring a p-voltage of only 0.9 V. The experiment represents the first demonstration of 100 Gbit/s OOK on the silicon photonic platform, featuring the lowest drive voltage and energy consumption ever demonstrated for a semiconductor-based device at this data rate. We support our results by a theoretical analysis showing that the nonlinear transfer characteristic of the MZM can help to overcome bandwidth limitations of the modulator and the electric driver circuitry. We expect that high-speed, power-efficient SOH modulators may have transformative impact on short-reach networks, enabling compact transceivers with unprecedented efficiency, thus building the base of future interfaces with Tbit/s data rates.
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