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research article

Ultrabroadband thin-film lithium tantalate modulator for high-speed communications

Wang, Chengli  
•
Fang, Dengyang
•
Zhang, Junyin  
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December 20, 2024
Optica

The continuous growth of global data traffic over the past three decades, along with advances in disaggregated computing architectures, presents significant challenges for optical transceivers in communication networks and high-performance computing systems. Specifically, there is a growing need to significantly increase data rates while reducing energy consumption and cost. High-performance optical modulators based on materials such as InP, thin-film lithium niobate (LiNbO3), or plasmonics have been developed, with LiNbO3 excelling in high-speed and low-voltage modulation. Nonetheless, the widespread industrial adoption of thin-film LiNbO3 remains compounded by the rather high cost of the underlying “on insulator” substrates—in sharp contrast to silicon photonics, which can benefit from strong synergies with high-volume applications in conventional microelectronics. Here, we demonstrate an integrated 110 GHz modulator using thin-film lithium tantalate (LiTaO3)—a material platform that is already commercially used for millimeter-wave filters and that can hence build upon technological and economical synergies with existing high-volume applications to offer scalable low-cost manufacturing. We show that the LiTaO3 photonic integrated circuit based modulator can support 176 GBd PAM8 transmission at net data rates exceeding 400 Gbit/s. Moreover, we show that using silver electrodes can reduce microwave losses compared to previously employed gold electrodes. Our demonstration positions the LiTaO3 modulator as a novel and highly promising integration platform for next-generation high-speed, energy-efficient, and cost-effective transceivers.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1364/OPTICA.537730
Scopus ID

2-s2.0-85213255953

Author(s)
Wang, Chengli  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Fang, Dengyang

Karlsruher Institut für Technologie

Zhang, Junyin  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Kotz, Alexander

Karlsruher Institut für Technologie

Lihachev, Grigory

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Churaev, Mikhail  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Li, Zihan  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Schwarzenberger, Adrian

Karlsruher Institut für Technologie

Ou, Xin

Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology Chinese Academy of Sciences

Koos, Christian

Karlsruher Institut für Technologie

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Date Issued

2024-12-20

Published in
Optica
Volume

11

Issue

12

Start page

1614

End page

1620

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LPQM1  
LPQM2  
FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

BMBF

16KISK010

GOSPEL

403187440

DFG

403188360

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Available on Infoscience
January 25, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/244532
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