Theory and Computational Modelling of a 3D Electro-Absorption Modulator

Abstract

Recently optoelectronics devices have been prominent in the research field. The electro-absorption modulator has been used to modulate the strength of a laser beam using an electrical voltage (intensity modulators) depending on the Franz-Keldysh effect. This paper presents a positive-intrinsic-negative diode (PIN) structure to model the electro-absorption modulator using the finite element method (FEM). This structure is distinguished by its has small footprint is only 10 µm2 has been getting. The proposed structure's dimension is carefully calculated to suit the 1.55 µm wavelength. The proposed modulator consists of germanium as a core and silicon as a substrate with an active length is 15 µm to be compatible with chip optical interconnects. The f-3db bandwidth is high equal to 61.5 GHz, despite the small footprint with low insertion loss and high extinction ratio at low reverse voltage bias.