Capacitive Silicon Modulator Design With V-Shaped SiO$_{2}$ Gate Waveguide to Optimize $V_{\pi }\times L$ and Bandwidth Trade-Off

This work presents a capacitive modulator design and modeling of a new waveguide architecture using silicon and poly-si technologies. We use a methodology involving the entire lumped-type modulator design process, from the optical design to the small-signal RF analysis. By means of geometric and physical parameters adjustments, the trade-offs among several figures of merit are analyzed in this paper. Due to the waveguide configuration, it is shown that the modulator can improve the tradeoff between V
_π
and bandwidth compared to the state-of-the-art for this kind of device. For instance, the best combinations are V
_π
≏1V @ 20.4 GHz and V
_π
= 5.7V @ ~31 GHz, with equivalent optical losses of 3 dB and 1.1 dB, respectively.