Limited Applicability of the Constant Optical Power Controller to the Integrated Intensity Electro-Optic Modulator

摘要

A bias drift is one of the issues facing the integrated intensity electro-optic modulators of Mach-Zehnder type. There have been developed several methods to compensate the drift. One of them is stabilization of an average output optical power of the modulator at constant value by means of suitable feedback. The paper deals with applicability of this method to the modulator equipped with integrated monitor photodiode working in radiating mode. An evaluation of efficiency of the method is presented here on basis of theoretical considerations and worked-out experiments as well. Surprisingly, the results reveal very limited applicability of the method in practice due to potential unreliability of optical connectors used to couple the light to the modulator.