Sub-volt high-speed silicon MOSCAP microring modulator driven by high-mobility conductive oxide.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38280874.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-45130-4 and PMC identifier 10821938.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Silicon microring modulator plays a critical role in energy-efficient optical interconnect and optical computing owing to its ultra-compact footprint and capability for on-chip wavelength-division multiplexing. However, existing silicon microring modulators usually require more than 2 V of driving voltage (V<sub>pp</sub>), which is limited by both material properties and device structures. Here, we present a metal-oxide-semiconductor capacitor microring modulator through heterogeneous integration between silicon photonics and titanium-doped indium oxide, which is a high-mobility transparent conductive oxide (TCO) with a strong plasma dispersion effect. The device is co-fabricated by Intel's photonics fab and our in-house TCO patterning processes, which exhibits a high modulation efficiency of 117 pm/V and consequently can be driven by a very low V<sub>pp</sub> of 0.8 V. At a 11 GHz modulation bandwidth where the modulator is limited by the RC bandwidth, we obtained 25 Gb/s clear eye diagrams with energy efficiency of 53 fJ/bit.