Micro-Ring Modulators With Integrated Inductor to Mitigate Bandwidth and Extinction Ratio Trade-Off

We propose and demonstrate a C-band silicon micro-ring modulator (MRM) with an on-chip inductor to mitigate the trade-off between electro-optic (EO) bandwidth and extinction ratio (ER). The outer ER of the proposed MRM’s 200 Gbps four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) eye-diagram is 1.0 dB at 3 dB insertion loss (IL) operation point, and the EO bandwidth is 64.1 GHz. The outer ER rises to 3.0 dB when IL rises to 6 dB, with a modest decrease in EO bandwidth to 55.5 GHz. Specifically, the reduction in EO bandwidth of the MRM with an on-chip inductor is 2.9 times lower than that of the MRM without an on-chip inductor.