Lithium niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) is a promising integration platform for various applications, such as optical communication, microwave photonics, and nonlinear optics. To make Lithium niobate (LN) photonic integrated circuits (PICs) more practical, low-loss fiber–chip coupling is essential. In this Letter, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a silicon nitride (SiN) assisted tri-layer edge coupler on LNOI platform. The edge coupler consists of a bilayer LN taper and an interlayer coupling structure composed of an 80 nm-thick SiN waveguide and an LN strip waveguide. The measured fiber–chip coupling loss for the TE mode is 0.75 dB/facet at 1550 nm. Transition loss between the SiN waveguide and LN strip waveguide is ∼0.15 dB. In addition, the fabrication tolerance of the SiN waveguide in the tri-layer edge coupler is high.

In this work, we report a linearity-enhanced dual-parallel Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) on a thin-film lithium niobate platform. By setting the optical and electrical splitting ratios at a specific condition, the third-order intermodulation distortions (IMD3) of the child MZMs cancel with each other, whereas the first-order harmonics (FH) reach the maximum. Passive devices instead of thermo-optical switches are used to control the optical power and phase of the child MZMs, which greatly improve the device stability and simplify the operation complexity. To the best of our knowledge, the experimental results show a record-high spurious-free dynamic range on a thin-film lithium niobate platform (110.7 dB·Hz${}^{2/3}$ at 1 GHz). The E-O response decayed about 1.9 dB from 10 MHz to 40 GHz, and the extrapolated E-O 3 dB bandwidth is expected to be 70 GHz. A half-wave voltage of 2.8 V was also achieved. The proposed modulator provides a promising solution for high-bandwidth and low-voltage analog optical links.

An on-chip 64-channel hybrid (de)multiplexer for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and mode-division multiplexing (MDM) is designed and demonstrated on a 220 nm SOI platform for the demands of large capacity optical interconnections. The designed hybrid (de)multiplexer includes a 4-channel mode (de)multiplexer and 16-channel wavelength-division (de)multiplexers. The mode (de)multiplexer is comprised of cascaded asymmetric directional couplers supporting coupling between fundamental TE mode and higher-order modes with low crosstalks in a wide wavelength range. The wavelength-division (de)multiplexers consist of two bi-directional micro-ring resonator arrays for four 16-channel WDM signals. Micro-heaters are placed on the micro-resonators for thermal tuning. According to the experimental results, the excess loss is <3.9 dB in one free spectral range from 1522 nm to 1552 nm and <5.6 dB in three free spectral ranges from 1493 nm to 1583 nm. The intermode crosstalks are −23.2 dB to −33.2 dB, and the isolations between adjacent and nonadjacent wavelength channels are about −17.1 dB and −22.3 dB, respectively. The thermal tuning efficiency is ∼2.22 mW/nm over one free spectral range.

In this paper, an on-chip photonic sampled and quantized analog-to-digital converter (ADC) on thin-film lithium niobate platform is experimentally demonstrated. Using two phase modulators as a sampler and a 5×5 multimode interference (MMI) coupler as a quantizer, a 1 GHz sinusoidal analog input signal was successfully converted to a digitized output with a 20 GSample/s sampling rate. To evaluate the system performance, the quantization curves together with the transfer function of the ADC were measured. The experimental effective number of bits (ENOB) was 3.17. The demonstrated device is capable of operating at a high frequency over 67 GHz, making it a promising solution for on-chip ultra-high speed analog-to-digital conversion.

Electro-optic modulators with large bandwidth and low voltage are crucial for the high-baud-rate digital communication and high-carrier-frequency analog links. Recently, thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) modulators with sub-1 V voltage and 140 GHz bandwidth have been emerged on the low permittivity substrates, such as quartz. However, on the high permittivity environment, such as silicon substrates, the bandwidth dramatically reduced to below 100 GHz even if the voltage was raised to around 3 V. We break the voltage-bandwidth trade-off limit in TFLN modulators on silicon substrates using low inductance thick metal traveling wave electrodes, which reduce RF phase index and microwave losses while preserving high EO modulation efficiency. We demonstrate a TFLN EO modulator on silicon substrate with 3 dB EO bandwidth $>$ 120 GHz and half-wave voltage $(V_\pi) < $ 2 V. Bandwidth/ $V_\pi$ reach 60, which is significantly larger than traditional TFLN modulators. The proposed thin-film lithium niobate modulators offers a practical solution for the hybrid integration of silicon and lithium niobate.

Thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) electro-optic modulators are crucial for high-baud-rate digital communication and high-carrier-frequency analog links. Typically, TFLN modulators have half-wave voltage-length products (V _π ⋅L) much larger than that of silicon modulators or InP modulators due to the weak overlap between the long device optical and RF fields long device roll. In this work, we present a high-efficiency TFLN traveling-wave (TW) Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) with ridge-top transparent electrodes on the TFLN waveguides. A low V _π ⋅L of 0.33 V·cm is achieved, while the EO response of a 300-μm-long device rolls off 2.4 dB at 110 GHz, with a 3-dB EO bandwidth extrapolated to be 145 GHz. The on-chip insertion loss is 2.7 dB. A high-frequency model of TFLN TW-MZM with transparent electrodes is proposed. Three operation regions exist according to the resistivity of transparent electrodes, that is, the slow-wave region, the dispersion region, and the high residue in the weak overlap region. For high modulation efficiency and high-speed modulators, a slow wave region with resistivity less than 3 ×10⁻³ Ω·cm is required.