[10p-N405-1~11] CS.7 Code-sharing Session of 3.15 & 4.2

[10p-N405-11] OMA penalty by Inter-Arm Imbalance in Mach-Zehnder Silicon Optical Modulators

〇Tadashi Murao¹, Jun Ushida¹, Hiroyuki Takahashi¹, Masatoshi Tokushima¹, Akemi Shiina¹, Tsuyoshi Horikawa¹ (1.PETRA)

Keywords:silicon photonics, optical modulator

Geometric variation caused by nonuniformity of the photolithography, plasma etch process, and SOI thickness has been a major issue in silicon waveguides. In addition, wafer-scale variation in optical phase shifts is inevitable in carrier-depletion Mach-Zehnder silicon modulators due to the additional nonuniformity of the carrier density distributions caused by ion implantation. In this presentation, it is shown that the inter-arm variation for phase shifters can be characterized by using the proposed modulation efficiency considering the voltage dependence. Moreover, the impact of the variation on device performance is quantified by using the optical modulation amplitude (OMA) penalty. The evaluation of the penalty is demonstrated for the fabricated modulators on a 300-mm SOI wafer by employing the on-wafer measurement for the ME.