Sub-volt dual-drive silicon Mach–Zehnder modulator with an energy efficiency of 60 fJ bit −1

Abstract Low-voltage silicon photonic modulators are essential for enabling high-speed on-chip interconnects. Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible operation eliminates the need for high-swing drivers, reducing design complexity and power dissipation. This paper presents a shielded-lines Mach–Zehnder modulator that effectively suppresses the odd-mode while maintaining CMOS process compatibility. The device exhibits a high modulation efficiency of 1.5 V·cm and achieves an electro-optic bandwidth of 43 GHz. At a 0.7 V single-ended drive voltage, the modulator achieves 100 Gbaud PAM4 operation with an extinction ratio of 2.25 dB, a transmission delay equivalent signal-to-noise ratio of 2.11 dB, and a linearity of 0.965, while consuming 60 fJ bit −1 . These results mitigate persistent power consumption challenges in optical interconnect applications.