High Bandwidth and Low Driving Voltage Add-Drop Micro-Ring Modulator for Optical Interconnection I/O Chips

An ultra compact add-drop silicon micro-ring modulator with free spectrum range of 22.9 nm and modulation efficiency of 30.4 pm/V has been demonstrated. The electro-optical bandwidth of the modulator is greater than 90 GHz and can reach 110 GHz under the optical peaking effect. The modulator can achieve 128 Gb/s NRZ signal transmission at 1.36 V drive voltage with an extinction ratio of 3.28 dB, the corresponding power consumption is ∼4.93 fJ/bit. The calculated back-to-back bit error ratio (BER) of 128 Gb/s NRZ signal is 2.1×10⁻³ at −3 dBm receiving optical power lower than hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) assumption threshold and 1.5×10⁻² at −5.5 dBm receiving optical power lower than soft-decision forward error correction (SD-FEC) assumption threshold.