Electrostatic Doping Assisted Push-Pull Mach Zehnder Modulator for Optical Interconnects

In this paper, we propose and analyse the performance of an electrostatic doping assisted optical phase shifter loaded push-pull Mach Zehnder modulator (MZM) suitable for short reach optical interconnects. The proposed modulator can be fabricated on standard silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform and is free from the requirement of highly doped optical waveguide. Theoretical analysis as well as simulation for the performance estimation for the proposed modulator have been presented in this paper. Simulation results indicate that the proposed MZM can support upto 35.2 Gb/s data rate with 4.7 dB of dynamic extinction ratio (ER) and introduces only 5.1 dB of insertion loss (IL). Results also indicates the proposed modulator supports hard decision (HD) FEC BER of $3. 8 \times 10^{-3}$ at 25 Gb/s data rate over a 5 km of standard single mode fiber (SSMF) enabling it suitable for intra-data center optical interconnects.