Ultra-High-Speed Deeply Etched Electrooptic Polymer Modulator

In this paper, we present a novel ultra-high-speed polymer-based electrooptic modulator that incorporates high permittivity material cladding on the side walls of the device. We show that by packing the side walls of the modulator with this material and varying the width of the dielectric stack and electrodes that broadband operation can be achieved while maintaining a very low drive voltage in a compact device. Initially, a quasi-TEM analysis is undertaken in order to determine the modulators response to topographical variation followed by a full-wave analysis on the optimized device. The full-wave analysis is employed in order to determine any frequency dispersion effects with respect to the modulators characteristic impedance Z_c, microwave effective index N_m, microwave and dielectric losses α_c and α_d and the half-wave voltage-length product V_πL.