A novel three-terminal transistor-based Mach-Zehnder interferometric modulator on silicon-on-silicon (SOS) substrate

We present a new three-terminal transistor, or the double-diode transistor (DDT) based Mach-Zehnder interferometric (MZI) modulator fabricated on silicon-on-silicon (SOS) substrate. The DDT structure is first analyzed in terms of a simplest ideal equivalent circuit, before DDT based MZI modulator, and measure the electronic and optical characteristics of DDT based Mach-Zehnder interference. In the end, we prove that the current pass thought our device will lead to thermal-optic effect not free carrier injection effect. This result can give a good explanation of that why the optical signal response times of SOS MZI modulators are 4~5 orders slower than the response time of the I_sd current.