Ultra Wideband Dual-Output Thin Film Lithium Niobate Intensity Modulator

This paper presents the design, optimization, fabrica-tion, and characterization of a dual-output, wideband, thin-filmlithium niobate Mach-Zehnder Modulator (TFLN-MZM). Thedevice is designed with ridge etched waveguides for operation ata 1.55 mu m wavelength. The dual-output is achieved using a 2x2multi-mode interference (MMI) splitter with an extinction ratio(ER) of over 40 dB. The measured DC half-wave voltage (V-pi)is 1.02 V. To achieve wideband operation, segmented electrodesare optimized to provide both wideband index matching and lowloss. Accordingly, the measured 3 dB bandwidth is 95 GHz and theradio-frequency (RF) electrode loss is 0.24 dB/(cm<middle dot>GHz(1/2)). Themotivation for this device is in balanced microwave photonic links(MPLs) for Radio-Frequency-over-Fiber (RFoF) applications