Low-voltage, high-extinction-ratio, Mach-Zehnder silicon optical modulator for CMOS compatible integration

We demonstrate a carrier-depletion optical modulator with the driving voltage swing of 2 V and the extinction ratio of 12.79 dB at 12.5 Gbit/s. Even the driving voltage is reduced to 1 V, the the device still has an extinction ratio of 7.67 dB.