Abstract
We present a method to analyze electrical and optical characteristics of traveling-wave electroabsorption modulators (TW-EAMs) using the finite-difference time-domain method. We consider the interaction between electromagnetic fields and optical powers in waveguides in time domain to model electrical and optical behaviors of TW-EAMs. The effects of microwave properties of waveguides on modulation response and output optical power of TW-EAMs are analyzed by the proposed method. The characteristic impedance of TW-EAMs is more important than microwave index to obtain large modulation bandwidth of TW-EAMs when impedance matching techniques are not used. However, effective refractive index match between microwave and lightwave becomes important as the waveguide length increases. The microwave property closely related to the extinction ratio of output optical powers is the microwave loss. When impedance match is achieved by low-impedance termination, the velocity matching between microwave and lightwave becomes important.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 763-769 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2003 May |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Manuscript received November 22, 2002; revised July 1, 2003. This work was supported in part by the University Research Program supported by the Ministry of Information and Communication, and in part by the NRL program in South Korea. The authors are with the Department of Radio Engineering, Korea University, Seoul 136-701, Korea. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTQE.2003.818847
Keywords
- Electroabsorption
- Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method
- Traveling-wave modulator
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering