High-Production-Rate Fabrication of Low-Loss Lithium Niobate Electro-Optic Modulators Using Photolithography Assisted Chemo-Mechanical Etching (PLACE)

Abstract

Integrated thin-film lithium niobate (LN) electro-optic (EO) modulators of broad bandwidth, low insertion loss, low cost and high production rate are essential elements in contemporary interconnection industries and disruptive applications. Here, we demonstrated the design and fabrication of a high performance thin-film LN EO modulator using photolithography assisted chemo-mechanical etching (PLACE) technology. Our device shows a 3-dB bandwidth over 50 GHz, along with a comparable low half wave voltage-length product of 2.16 Vcm and a fiber-to-fiber insertion loss of 2.6 dB. The PLACE technology supports large footprint, high fabrication uniformity, competitive production rate and extreme low device optical loss simultaneously, our result shows promising potential for developing high-performance large-scale low-loss photonic integrated devices.