ORCID

0009-0008-3134-7062

Keywords

Integrated photonics, Electro-optic materials, RF photonics, Electro-optic modulators; Thin-film devices

Abstract

The views expressed in this dissertation are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

The explosive growth of human connectedness over the previous decades has, and will continue to strain the communication infrastructure under-girding modern economies, and society. The continuous expansion of data-centers, advanced artificial intelligence models, and remote data storage will require novel high bandwidth solutions for both long haul and local inter-connects. Current solutions seek to expand link bandwidth through the use of complex high baud rate constellations, in which the energy requirements scale with the constellation symbol complexity. This solution eventually becomes untenable as data transport, and cooling already accounts for a significant portion of energy production. A solution which is compact, energy efficient, and capable of high channel bandwidths must be designed and fielded to address burgeoning concerns. In this work, just such a device is proposed on the thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) platform by flipping the electro-optic modulator (EOM) design paradigm. By first designing a slow wave electrode with the express purpose of increasing the interaction length of the radio frequency (RF) and optical fields in the arms of a Mach-Zhender interferometer (MZI) it has been shown that complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compliant logic voltages can be achieved with greater than 100 GHz bandwidths. This result is a first-in-class achievement providing significant improvements in wall-plug efficiency for optical communications over fiber. No additional RF-amplifiers are required to drive such high-efficiency modulators. This allows for direct conversion of electrical computational signals to optical communication with reduced overhead cooling. A dual micro-structured slow-wave coplanar waveguide (CPW) was developed with decreased loss, while maintaining similar field intensities to traditional traveling wave electrodes. When coupled with cascaded apodized gratings, optical and RF velocity matching can be achieved for enhanced device performance.

Completion Date

2025

Semester

Fall

Committee Chair

Fathpour, Sasan

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Optics and Photonics

Format

PDF

Identifier

DP0029719

Document Type

Thesis

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

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