The plasmonic BTO-on-SiN platform – beyond 200 GBd modulation for optical communications
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2025-12-16
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Journal Article
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yes
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Abstract
An integrated photonics platform that offers high-speed modulators in addition to low-loss and versatile passive components is highly sought after for different applications ranging from AI to next-generation Tbit/s links in optical fiber communication. For this purpose, we introduce the plasmonic BTO-on-SiN platform for high-speed electro-optic modulators. This platform combines the advantages provided by low-loss silicon nitride (SiN) photonics with the highly nonlinear barium titanate (BTO) as the active material. Nanoscale plasmonics enables high-speed modulators operating at electro-optical bandwidths up to 110 GHz with active lengths as short as 5 µm. Here, we demonstrate three different modulators: a 256 GBd C-band Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulator, a 224 GBd C-band IQ modulator – being both the first BTO IQ and the first IQ modulator on SiN for data communication – and finally, a 200 GBd O-band racetrack (RT) modulator. With this approach we show record data rates of 448 Gbit/s with the IQ modulator and 340 Gbit/s with the MZ modulator. Furthermore, we demonstrate the first plasmonic RT modulator with BTO and how it is ideally suited for low complexity communication in the O-band with low device loss of 2 dB. This work leverages the SiN platform and shows the potential of this technology to serve as a solution to combat the ever-increasing demand for fast modulators.
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published
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Volume
14
Pages / Article No.
399
Publisher
Nature
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03974 - Leuthold, Juerg / Leuthold, Juerg
02635 - Institut für Elektromagnetische Felder / Institute of Electromagnetic Fields
Notes
Funding
871658 - Neuro-augmented 112Gbaud CMOS plasmonic transceiver platform for Intra- and Inter-DCI (EC)