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Plasmonic IQ modulators with attojoule per bit electrical energy consumption

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 inform...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Heni, Wolfgang, Fedoryshyn, Yuriy, Baeuerle, Benedikt, Josten, Arne, Hoessbacher, Claudia B., Messner, Andreas, Haffner, Christian, Watanabe, Tatsuhiko, Salamin, Yannick, Koch, Ueli, Elder, Delwin L., Dalton, Larry R., Leuthold, Juerg
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6461703/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30979888
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09724-7
Descripción
Sumario: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.