Abstract

Electroabsorption (EA) Modulators are of considerable practical concern to over 40 Gb/s fiber transmission systems. The advantages of EA modulators are low driving voltage and small size. To date, several 40 Gb/s EA modulators have been demonstrated.^1–3 The speed of the EA modulator is limited by its capacitance. Therefore, the device length of EA section is kept short around 100 µm and the number of quantum well increase. On the other hand, the insertion loss of EA modulator increases with an increase in the number of quantum well. As a result, it is difficult to achieve the characteristics, for example, a frequency bandwidth, a high extinction ratio and a low insertion loss.

© 2002 Optical Society of America