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      Plasmonic IQ modulators with attojoule per bit electrical energy consumption

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          Abstract

          Coherent optical communications provides the largest data transmission capacity with the highest spectral efficiency and therefore has a remarkable potential to satisfy today’s ever-growing bandwidth demands. It relies on so-called in-phase/quadrature (IQ) electro-optic modulators that encode information on both the amplitude and the phase of light. Ideally, such IQ modulators should offer energy-efficient operation and a most compact footprint, which would allow high-density integration and high spatial parallelism. Here, we present compact IQ modulators with an active section occupying a footprint of 4 × 25 µm × 3 µm, fabricated on the silicon platform and operated with sub-1-V driving electronics. The devices exhibit low electrical energy consumptions of only 0.07 fJ bit −1 at 50 Gbit s −1, 0.3 fJ bit −1 at 200 Gbit s −1, and 2 fJ bit −1 at 400 Gbit s −1. Such IQ modulators may pave the way for application of IQ modulators in long-haul and short-haul communications alike.

          Abstract

          Increasing bandwidth demands in optical communications requires components to be compact with energy-efficient operation. Here, the authors demonstrate plasmonic IQ modulators on a silicon photonics platform with phase shifters, operating with sub-1V electronics at 100 GBaud and low electrical energy consumption.

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          Most cited references57

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          Micrometre-scale silicon electro-optic modulator.

          Metal interconnections are expected to become the limiting factor for the performance of electronic systems as transistors continue to shrink in size. Replacing them by optical interconnections, at different levels ranging from rack-to-rack down to chip-to-chip and intra-chip interconnections, could provide the low power dissipation, low latencies and high bandwidths that are needed. The implementation of optical interconnections relies on the development of micro-optical devices that are integrated with the microelectronics on chips. Recent demonstrations of silicon low-loss waveguides, light emitters, amplifiers and lasers approach this goal, but a small silicon electro-optic modulator with a size small enough for chip-scale integration has not yet been demonstrated. Here we experimentally demonstrate a high-speed electro-optical modulator in compact silicon structures. The modulator is based on a resonant light-confining structure that enhances the sensitivity of light to small changes in refractive index of the silicon and also enables high-speed operation. The modulator is 12 micrometres in diameter, three orders of magnitude smaller than previously demonstrated. Electro-optic modulators are one of the most critical components in optoelectronic integration, and decreasing their size may enable novel chip architectures.
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            Integrated lithium niobate electro-optic modulators operating at CMOS-compatible voltages

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              The Past, Present, and Future of Silicon Photonics

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                wheni@ethz.ch
                leuthold@ethz.ch
                Journal
                Nat Commun
                Nat Commun
                Nature Communications
                Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                2041-1723
                12 April 2019
                12 April 2019
                2019
                : 10
                : 1694
                Affiliations
                [1 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2156 2780, GRID grid.5801.c, Institute of Electromagnetic Fields (IEF), , ETH Zurich, ; 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
                [2 ]ISNI 0000000122986657, GRID grid.34477.33, Department of Chemistry, , University of Washington, ; Seattle, WA 98195-1700 USA
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0861-2530
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6482-7870
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8545-915X
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8900-3237
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6538-9040
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7849-9644
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8947-5293
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9958-8737
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1797-2968
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8796-2146
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9302-3858
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6461-0145
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0111-8169
                Article
                9724
                10.1038/s41467-019-09724-7
                6461703
                30979888
                aa8ac5c6-6b4f-4dff-ae0a-2bb1b68f6b38
                © The Author(s) 2019

                Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 19 November 2018
                : 20 March 2019
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