In a silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator with on-chip termination, the reflection of the driving signal in the traveling wave electrode often occurs due to non-ideal factors. This may influence the modulating signal characteristics. To study such influence, the S₁₁ response of the electrode is averaged over different frequency ranges to characterize the reflection of the driving signal in the electrode. We find that the signal-to-noise ratio and the jitter can be substantially affected by the reflection. In addition, for the same characteristic, when the averaging frequency range for S₁₁ varies, the relations between mean S₁₁ and the output signal characteristics may also vary to some extent. Understanding of these phenomena are potentially useful to the applications of the modulators in the optical communication systems.

Date Published: 20 December 2019
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 11209, Eleventh International Conference on Information Optics and Photonics (CIOP 2019), 1120930 (20 December 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2548775

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 11209:
Eleventh International Conference on Information Optics and Photonics (CIOP 2019)
Hannan Wang, Editor(s)