40 Gbaud binary phase shift keying signal modulation using a substrate removed silicon modulator

Abstract

Substrate removing technique is proposed in silicon Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) to improve the electro-optic bandwidth. Based on this technique, a silicon MZM with 3 dB electro-optical bandwidth of 55 GHz is achieved at 5 V reverse bias for the first time. The V[Formula: see text] L of the modulator is 1.3 V[Formula: see text]cm with an on-chip insertion loss of 5.4 dB. The substrate removing technique reduces the electrode transmission loss, achieves the electro-optical group index matching and realizes 50 [Formula: see text] impedance matching, simultaneously. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate BPSK modulation based on this modulator at the baud rate up to 56 Gb/s.