IS05 – Thermal crosstalk mitigation in a dual-drive Mach-Zehnder Modulator

Dual-drive, PIN-diode based Mach-Zehnder modulators are pivotal for power-efficient and cost-effective CMOS compatible optical transceivers with small footprints. However, the basic chip materials have substantial thermal conductance resulting in thermal crosstalk, which eventually deteriorates the modulator performance in terms of bandwidth and data transmission capabilities. In this work, we simulate and analyze the influence of thermal crosstalk on such a modulator and the mitigation of the same with a deep air trench design. Additionally, we illustrate the improved modulator performance in terms of small-signal bandwidth and eye diagram at higher data rates.