%0 Journal Article
%T Breaking the energy-bandwidth limit of electro-optic modulators: theory and a device proposal
%A Hongtao Lin
%A Okechukwu Ogbuu
%A Jifeng Liu
%A Lin Zhang
%A Jurgen Michel
%A Juejun Hu
%J Physics
%D 2013
%I arXiv
%R 10.1109/JLT.2013.2280820
%X In this paper, we quantitatively analyzed the trade-off between energy per bit for switching and modulation bandwidth of classical electro-optic modulators. A formally simple energy-bandwidth limit (Eq. 10) is derived for electro-optic modulators based on intra-cavity index modulation. To overcome this limit, we propose a dual cavity modulator device which uses a coupling modulation scheme operating at high bandwidth (> 200 GHz) not limited by cavity photon lifetime and simultaneously features an ultra-low switching energy of 0.26 aJ, representing over three orders of magnitude energy consumption reduction compared to state-of-the-art electro-optic modulators.
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1552v4