Benchmarking Si, SiGe, and III–V/Si Hybrid SIS Optical Modulators for Datacenter Applications

Recently, Si-photonics received a growing interest and started to move from laboratories to industrial product development, mainly for the applications inside data-centers. One of the weaknesses of Si is its relatively low plasma dispersion efficiency, making the size of phase modulator large. This efficiency can be improved by using the heterogeneous integration of material such as InP, InGaAsP, or SiGe to fabricate hybrid semiconductor–insulator–semiconductor (SIS) optical phase modulators. At the same time, the standard figure of merit for modulator benchmarking $V_{\pi }L_{\pi }$ does not consider the dynamic behavior of the SIS devices, nor is making the link with the system level specifications such as optical modulation amplitude (OMA), widely used in 100G to 400G parallel single mode or coarse wavelength division multiplexing applications. In this paper, we propose to simply link the modulator performance to the OMA, to derive a compact model for SIS devices and to compare hybrid device performances for various materials.