Low-voltage high-speed coupling modulation in silicon racetrack ring resonators.

We demonstrate a low-voltage high-speed modulator based on a silicon racetrack resonator with a tunable Mach-Zehnder interferometer coupler. Both static measurement and dynamic modulation experiment are carried out. The 3-dB electro-optic bandwidth is measured to be >30 GHz beyond the limit by the cavity photon lifetime. A 32 Gb/s on-off keying (OOK) modulation is realized under a peak-to-peak drive voltage as low as 0.4 V, and a 28 Gb/s binary phase-shift-keying (BPSK) modulation is realized with a drive voltage of 3 V. The low drive voltages results in low energy consumptions of ~13.3 fJ/bit and ~1.2 pJ/bit for OOK and BPSK modulations, respectively.