A schematic of the slow-light modulator on SOI wafer that consists of a series of fishbone-like Bragg gratings. /PKU
A team led by China's Peking University has made a breakthrough in pure silicon modulator, achieving the world's first pure silicon modulator with a bandwidth reaches 110 gigahertz (GHz).
It is the first time that the bandwidth of a pure silicon modulator was increased to over 100 GHz since the Intel released the first 1GHz silicon modulator in the journal Nature in 2004, according to School of Electronics of the Peking University (PKU).
Silicon modulators are the essential building blocks for silicon photonics, since they are responsible for converting electrical signals to optical ones, which are indispensable in any information technology applications, such as data transmission, interconnection, processing, and computing, according to the study.
A screenshot of the study published in the journal Science Advances on October 20.
It is a major breakthrough in the field of silicon-based optoelectronics, said the Science and Technology Daily, citing Wang Xingjun, a PKU professor.
Featuring ultrahigh bandwidth, ultrasmall size and other, the pure silicon modulator will provide key technical support for the application of high-speed, short-distance data centers and optical communications, and is of great significance to the development of next-generation data centers, it added.
The study was published in the journal Science Advances in October.