Characterization and Performance Comparison of Low-Voltage, High-Speed, Push-Pull and Traveling-Wave Silicon Mach-Zehnder Modulators.

摘要

The well-known power and memory walls are recognized as the current bottlenecks in computing performance, and with the increasing computational load of commonly run applications, it is necessary to find ways to alleviate the issues presented by the aforementioned bottlenecks. It is therefore necessary to not focus solely on extracting performance improvement by way of changes to the processing architecture, but rather by holistically improving the computing platform, namely the communications backbone. This work focuses on the characterization and performance comparison of two families of optical data modulators, both fundamentally Mach Zehnder modulators (MZMs); namely, a modulator with a Push-Pull (PP) modulation scheme, and another modulator with a Traveling-Wave Electrode (TWE) design, prioritizing the effects on high-speed performance. A number of operating conditions.