Wang, ChengliFang, DengyangZhang, JunyinKotz, AlexanderLihachev, GrigoryChuraev, MikhailLi, ZihanSchwarzenberger, AdrianOu, XinKoos, ChristianKippenberg, Tobias J.2025-01-252025-01-252025-01-252024-12-2010.1364/OPTICA.5377302-s2.0-85213255953https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/244532The 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.truetext::journal::journal article::research article