Ultra-Compact Wideband Electro-Optic Modulator based on Ferroelectric Materials

An ultra-low V? modulator technology is needed to meet the challenges of rapidly growing integration density of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and sensitivity requirements of many DoD applications such as microwave photonic links (MPLs). Herein, PSI proposes to develop the next generation electrooptical (EO) modulator using barium titanium oxide (BTO) as the nonlinear medium. Based on the exceptionally large Pockels effect exhibited in BTO, ~10x improvement of V?L compared to a state-of-the-art LNOI modulator is expected. As a result, a high-performance and compact modulator can be heterogeneously integrated with Si PICs without wasting wafer real estate due to large mismatches in sizes. In addition, a modulator with an ultra-low V?, e.g., <0.3V, significantly elevates the performance of an MPL without using complicated link architectures, which is critical to practical system deployment in war fighters.