Abstract

Over the past few years, external modulators have become increasingly attractive for applications in high speed, long-haul optical transmission systems. To avoid additional complexity and cost of monolithic or hybrid integration of lasers with modulators, directly modulated lasers may be preferable however the lowest frequency chirp demonstrated so far under high speed modulation have been with external modulators. Low loss¹ and high speed² modulators have previously been reported in different structures. The combination of these two properties in one device would be highly desirable for high speed communications. In this paper, we describe a λ = 1.3 µm bulk electroabsorption waveguide modulator based on a new multi-quaternary layer design with low insertion loss, high extinction ratio, low operating voltage, and a modulation bandwidth in excess of 9 GHz.

© 1991 Optical Society of America