Design Challenges in Silicon Photonics Mach-Zehnder Modulators

Abstract

Communication plays a vital role in people's life. As more people are relying on computing power and artificial intelligence system to finish their daily tasks, high-speed communication methods are required. Also, as the current crisis of COVID-19 spread, people had to work and study remotely to stop the spreading of the virus. All this increased reliance on telecommunication systems requires high bandwidth to support millions staying at home. This highly interconnected world and the easiness of communication using the internet have transformed the way people communicate and lead to the creation of new social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Due to the intense usage of those applications and the internet in general, a tremendous amount of information from people interacting with the internet is gathered. The increasing amount of data gathered per day lead to the creation of the data mining field. Data mining is the process of searching, filtering, analyzing, patterns in large data sets in order to understand and discover patterns by using an Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to identify the patterns. Communication is mainly optical communication, which is the backbone of the internet. On a device level, an Optical Modulator (OM) is used for on-chip communication. It is used to modulate a beam of light that can be carried over free space or propagating through an optical waveguide. As computing power increases, it is required to have a reliable communication method to communicate and send data between different parts of the chip itself. There are different optical modulator designs, most commonly based on the Mach-Zehnder II Interferometer (MZI). These modulators are therefore called Mach-Zehnder Modulators (MZM). Having a reliable OM over a large range of temperature while making it as small as possible is a challenge due to the high thermo-optical coefficient (TOC) of Silicon around 1.86∗10−4

Date of Award	Apr 2020
Original language	American English