Sean P. Anderson

Silicon high speed modulator for advanced modulation: device structures and exemplary modulator performance

Fiber optics is well established today due to the high capacity and speed, unrivaled flexibility and quality of service. However, state of the art optical elements and components are hardly scalable in terms of cost and size required to achieve competitive port density and cost per bit. Next-generation high-speed coherent optical communication systems targeting a data rate of 100-Gb/s and beyond goes along with innovations in component and subsystem areas. Consequently, by leveraging the advanced silicon micro and nano-fabrication technologies, significant progress in developing CMOS platform-based silicon photonic devices has been made all over the world. These achievements include the demonstration of high-speed IQ modulators, which are important building blocks in coherent optical communication systems. In this paper, we demonstrate silicon photonic QPSK modulator based on a metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) capacitor structure, address different modulator configuration structures and report our progress and research associated with highspeed advanced optical modulation in silicon photonics

Demonstration of Optical Transmission at Bit Rates of Up to 321.4 Gb/s Using Compact Silicon Based Modulator and Linear BiCMOS MZM Driver

We have designed and tested a compact flip-chip assembly that combines the photonic and electrical functionality of a Silicon Photonic modulator and a SiGe BiCMOS MZM-driver. This forms a basis for low-cost advanced optical transceivers.

Silicon Photonic Polarization-Multiplexing Nanotaper for Chip-to-Fiber Coupling

We describe the design and operation of a polarization-multiplexed optical coupler that is integrated into a silicon photonic IC. The design is based on a nanotaper, and thus permits broadband edge-based coupling to lensed single-mode fiber. Since it operates adiabatically, the polarization-multiplexing nanotaper exhibits superior performance over an extremely broad bandwidth of 130 nm, and is robust to the fabrication variations that are typical of CMOS processes. Polarization crosstalk is below -30 dB, PDL is within ±0.5 dB, and the insertion loss is comparable to that of a traditional single-polarization nanotaper. We also demonstrate the operation of the polarization-multiplexing nanotaper in a high-speed DP-QPSK test bed.