Ultra-compact lithium niobate microcavity electro-optic modulator beyond 110 GHz

A lithium-niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) electro-optic (EO) modulator based on a 2 × 2 FP-cavity was designed and realized with an ultra-compact footprint and an ultra-high bandwidth. A comprehensive analysis on the present LNOI FP-cavity modulator was conducted to reveal the dependence of modulation bandwidth and modulation efficiency on the cavity Q-factor and the operation wavelength detuning to the resonance. In particular, the 2 × 2 FP cavity was designed to achieve an optimal Q factor by reducing the reflectivity of reflectors and the cavity length, thus reducing the photon lifetime in the cavity . An ultra-short effective cavity length of only∼ 50 µm was achieved for the designed LNOI FP-cavity modulator, with itsfootprint being as compact as ∼ 4 × 500 µm2. It was demonstrated theoretically that the modulation bandwidth could be improved significantly to be over 200 GHz by utilizing the peaking enhancement effect. The fabricated device exhibited an excess loss of ∼ 1 dB and an extinction ratio of ∼ 20 dB in experiments, while the measured 3-dB bandwidth was higher than 110 GHz (beyond the maximal range of the facilities in experiments). Up till now, to our best knowledge, this has been the first LNOI microcavity modulator with a bandwidth higher than 110 GHz. Finally, high-quality eye-diagrams of 100 Gbps on-off keying (OOK) and 140 Gbps 4-pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) signals were demonstrated experimentally, and the energy consumption for the OOK signals was as low as 4.5 fJ/bit.