Various electrical and optical schemes used in Mach-Zehnder (MZ) silicon plasma dispersion effect modulators are explored. A rib waveguide reverse biased silicon diode modulator is designed, tested and found to operate at speeds up to 13 GHz with a V"L of 1.2 Vcm. MOS capacitor modulator designs are investigated as an alternative, but are not found to offer significant advantages. Modulators are also designed for fabrication in an actual CMOS process -a crucial step in the quest for low-cost integration with modern electronic devices. Photonic crystal structures, which promise smaller footprint sizes and lower power requirements, are also investigated, but it proves difficult to obtain a physically feasible design. Finally, a linearization scheme for Mach-Zehnder modulators is proposed to significantly improve signal fidelity in analog applications. Simulations are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this scheme for reverse biased silicon diode modulators.

This hands-on introduction to silicon photonics engineering equips students with everything they need to begin creating foundry-ready designs.

This book discusses some research results for CMOS-compatible silicon-based optical devices and interconnections. With accurate simulation and experimental demonstration, it provides insights on silicon-based modulation, advanced multiplexing, polarization and efficient coupling controlling technologies, which are widely used in silicon photonics. Researchers, scientists, engineers and especially students in the field of silicon photonics can benefit from the book. This book provides valuable knowledge, useful methods and practical design that can be considered in emerging silicon-based optical interconnections and communications. And it also give some guidance to student how to organize and complete an good dissertation.

In this book, silicon photonic integrated circuits are combined with electro-optic organic materials for realizing energy-efficient modulators with unprecedented performance. These silicon-organic hybrid Mach-Zehnder modulators feature a compact size, sub-Volt drive voltages, and they support data rates up to 84 Gbit/s. In addition, a wet chemical waveguide fabrication scheme and an efficient fiber-chip coupling scheme are presented.

Photonic Interconnects for Computing Systems provides a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art technology and research achievements in employing silicon photonics for interconnection networks and high-performance computing, summarizing main opportunities and some challenges.

We study the potential of the silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) platform for integrated optics. The unique properties of selected organic materials are added to silicon devices made with CMOS-based processes. We investigate the feasibility of this approach by making prototypes of key components in form of photonic integrated circuits: SOH lasers and SOH modulators are designed, fabricated, post-processed, and characterized. Application scenarios are identified.

"Global internet traffic has been growing exponentially in the past several years. This increase is fueled by video streaming services (e.g. Netflix, YouTube), cloud-based storages (e.g. Dropbox, google drive), and machine-to-machine (e.g. Internet of Things) applications. Since 2008 most Internet traffic has originated or been terminated in datacenters and the datacenter traffic is forecasted to grow three-fold in the next five years to reach 20.6 zettabytes by 2021. On-Off-Keying (OOK) has been the main modulation format employed in short reach optical interconnects. The simplicity of the transmitter and receiver architectures have been an important factor in the success of OOK for short reach optical links. Recently deployed, 100 Gb/s systems utilize OOK modulation in 4 × 25 Gb/s configuration. However, as we move towards 400 Gb/s and 1 Tb/s systems, OOK requires a proportional increase in the bandwidth. Hence, a more efficient modulation format is required to avoid such complexity. Silicon photonics (SiP) has recently become a popular choice for datacenter interconnects. Taking advantage of years of complementary metal oxide semiconductor research and development, SiP provides a low cost and high yield platform for datacenter optical interconnects. In this thesis, 3 different SiP Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) structures to generate higher order modulation formats are presented. First, the feasibility of utilizing coherent transmission systems as opposed to intensity modulation/direct detection systems for 400 Gb/s and 1 Tb/s systems are discussed and an Inphase-Quadrature modulator is presented. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using coherent systems for short reach applications. Next, we investigate and compare the performance advantages of generating 4-level Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM-4) using various structures of MZM optically, instead of generating PAM-4 in the electrical domain using digital to analog convertors (DACs) for 400 Gb/s systems. The two variants of optical-DACs are a Dual Parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator (DP-MZM) with one series push pull travelling wave MZM on each arm and a single MZM having two electrodes in series that we name Multi-Electrode MZM (ME-MZM). We present the optical design of the modulators and investigate the effects of non-linearities of the MZM transfer function and PN junction phase-shifters on performance of the PAM-4 generation. Then, the DC, small signal and large signal characterization of each modulator are presented. We parametrically examine the transmission performance of each modulator and present an optimized modulator design for optical generation and transmission of 112 Gb/s PAM-4 without using digital signal processing." --

Among the various elements of the silicon photonics platform, electro-optic IQ modulators play an important role. In this book, silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) integration is used to realize electro-optic IQ modulators for complex signal processing. Leveraging the high nonlinearity of organic materials, SOH IQ modulators provide low energy consumption for high-speed data transmission and frequency shifting. Furthermore, the device design is adapted for commercial foundry processes.

Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) has become one of the most widespread technologies for spatial light modulation in optics and photonics applications. These reflective microdisplays are composed of a high-performance silicon complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) backplane, which controls the light-modulating properties of the liquid crystal layer. State-of-the-art LCoS microdisplays may exhibit a very small pixel pitch (below 4 μm), a very large number of pixels (resolutions larger than 4K), and high fill factors (larger than 90%). They modulate illumination sources covering the UV, visible, and far IR. LCoS are used not only as displays but also as polarization, amplitude, and phase-only spatial light modulators, where they achieve full phase modulation. Due to their excellent modulating properties and high degree of flexibility, they are found in all sorts of spatial light modulation applications, such as in LCOS-based display systems for augmented and virtual reality, true holographic displays, digital holography, diffractive optical elements, superresolution optical systems, beam-steering devices, holographic optical traps, and quantum optical computing. In order to fulfil the requirements in this extensive range of applications, specific models and characterization techniques are proposed. These devices may exhibit a number of degradation effects such as interpixel cross-talk and fringing field, and time flicker, which may also depend on the analog or digital backplane of the corresponding LCoS device. The use of appropriate characterization and compensation techniques is then necessary.