Ultrabroadband thin-film lithium tantalate modulator for high-speed communications

The continuous growth of global data traffic over the past three decades, along with advances in disaggregated computing architectures, presents significant challenges for optical transceivers in communication networks and high-performance computing systems. Specifically, there is a growing need to significantly increase data rates while reducing energy consumption and cost. High-performance optical modulators based on materials such as InP, thin-film lithium niobate (LiNbO3), or plasmonics have been developed, with LiNbO3 excelling in high-speed and low-voltage modulation. Nonetheless, the widespread industrial adoption of thin-film LiNbO3 remains compounded by the rather high cost of the underlying “on insulator” substrates—in sharp contrast to silicon photonics, which can benefit from strong synergies with high-volume applications in conventional microelectronics. Here, we demonstrate an integrated 110 GHz modulator using thin-film lithium tantalate (LiTaO3)—a material platform that is already commercially used for millimeter-wave filters and that can hence build upon technological and economical synergies with existing high-volume applications to offer scalable low-cost manufacturing. We show that the LiTaO3 photonic integrated circuit based modulator can support 176 GBd PAM8 transmission at net data rates exceeding 400 Gbit/s. Moreover, we show that using silver electrodes can reduce microwave losses compared to previously employed gold electrodes. Our demonstration positions the LiTaO3 modulator as a novel and highly promising integration platform for next-generation high-speed, energy-efficient, and cost-effective transceivers.