This work achieves the desirable combination of low-pressure chemical vapor deposition silicon nitride (SiN) multi-layer photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with high-performance thin-film lithium niobate electro-optic (EO) modulators, made in a scalable foundry fabrication process using conventional low-resistivity silicon wafers. Operational parameters such as bandwidth, voltage, insertion loss and extinction ratio are reported for representative EO Mach–Zehnder modulator devices. The EO devices are seamlessly connected to low-loss SiN waveguides which have been used for superior performance in a wide range of PIC applications.
@article{rahman2025hybridlnsin,title={Integration of Hybrid Thin-Film Lithium Niobate Electro-optic Modulators on a Wafer-scale Silicon Nitride Photonics Platform},author={Rahman, Arif and Valdez, Forrest and Mere, Viphretuo and Op de Beeck, Camiel and Wuytens, Pieter and Mookherjea, Shayan},journal={Journal of Lightwave Technology},year={2025},pages={1--11},month=dec,publisher={IEEE},doi={10.1109/JLT.2025.3646212},url={https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11304539},note={Early Access}}
arXiv
High-performance Hybrid Lithium Niobate Electro-optic Modulators Integrated with Low-loss Silicon Nitride Waveguides on a Wafer-scale Silicon Photonics Platform
Arif Rahman, Forrest Valdez, Viphretuo Mere, and 3 more authors
Heterogeneously-integrated electro-optic modulators (EOM) are demonstrated using the hybrid-mode concept, incorporating thin-film lithium niobate (LN) by bonding with silicon nitride (SiN) passive photonics. At wavelengths near 1550 nm, these EOMs demonstrated greater than 30 dB extinction ratio, 3.8 dB on-chip insertion loss, a low-frequency half-wave voltage-length product (VπL) of 3.8 V.cm, and a 3-dB EO modulation bandwidth exceeding 110 GHz. This work demonstrates the combination of multi-layer low-loss SiN waveguides with high-performance LN EOMs made in a scalable fabrication process using conventional low-resistivity silicon (Si) wafers.
@article{rahman2025hybridlnsio,title={High-performance Hybrid Lithium Niobate Electro-optic Modulators Integrated with Low-loss Silicon Nitride Waveguides on a Wafer-scale Silicon Photonics Platform},author={Rahman, Arif and Valdez, Forrest and Mere, Viphretuo and Op de Beeck, Camiel and Wuytens, Pieter and Mookherjea, Shayan},journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.00311},year={2025},month=apr,pages={1--14},publisher={arXiv},doi={10.48550/arXiv.2504.00311},}
