Hybrid silicon lasers for optical interconnects

Abstract

We propose high-speed modulation of hybrid silicon lasers through modulation of the photon lifetime τP. TWO structures are presented to achieve τp-modulation by modifying the distributed loss or the feedback coefficient of the laser cavity. By using small-signal modeling and the finite-difference method, the responses in the frequency and time domains are given. It is shown that it is possible to achieve a 3 dB bandwidth of over 100 GHz and a high data transmission rate of more than 50 GHz. The theoretical analysis also shows that the chirp due to the variations of the carrier densities in the gain/modulation sections is very small. © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.