Growing global data traffic requires high-performance modulators with a compact size, a large bandwidth, a low optical loss, and a small power consumption. A careful trade-off among these parameters usually has to be made when designing such a device. Here, we propose and demonstrate an electro-optic ring modulator on the thin-film lithium niobate platform without compromising between any performances. The device exhibits a low on-chip loss of about 0.15 dB with a high intrinsic quality-factor (Q-factor) of 7.7 × 10 5 . Since a pure coupling modulation is employed, the photon lifetime is no longer a limiting factor for the modulation speed. A large electro-optic bandwidth is obtained without any roll-off up to 67 GHz. The device, with a footprint of 3.4 m m × 0.7 m m , also exhibits a low half-wave voltage of 1.75 V, corresponding to a half-wave voltage length product of 0.35 V ⋅ c m considering the 2-mm-long modulation section. Driverless data transmission up to 240 Gb/s is also demonstrated with a peak-to-peak driving voltage of 0.75 V.

Optical modulators have been and will continue to be essential devices for energy- and cost-efficient optical communication networks. Heterogeneous silicon and lithium niobate modulators have demonstrated promising performances of low optical loss, low drive voltage, and large modulation bandwidth. However, DC bias drift is a major drawback of optical modulators using lithium niobate as the active electro-optic material. Here, we demonstrate high-speed and bias-drift-free Mach–Zehnder modulators based on the heterogeneous silicon and lithium niobate platform. The devices combine stable thermo-optic DC biases in silicon and ultra-fast electro-optic modulation in lithium niobate, and exhibit a low insertion loss of 1.8 dB, a low half-wave voltage of 3 V, an electro-optic modulation bandwidth of at least 70 GHz, and modulation data rates up to 128 Gb/s.

A novel ultra-long distributed vibration sensor using forward transmission, coherent detection, and a frequency-shifted optical delay line is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. In the proposed scheme, a pair of multi-span optical fibers is deployed for sensing. A frequency-shifted optical delay line consisting of an acoustic-optic modulator and a time delay fiber is used at the far end of these two fibers. Coherent detection is used to retrieve the vibration induced phase fluctuations of the base-band signals as well as the intermediate frequency signals generated by the frequency-shifted optical delay line. Two differential phase signals can be calculated from the obtained phase fluctuations, which can then be used to localize the vibration events by correlation operations. Localization of a few hundred Hz, around 1 kHz and tens of kHz vibrations has been experimentally demonstrated over a total length of 1230 km sensing fiber. Less than 125 m spatial resolution can be obtained over the 615 km sensing range for vibrations with larger than 1 kHz frequency by using averaging of 30 times tests due to the nature of asynchronous operation. Frequencies from infrasound to ultrasound can be detected. The proposed scheme has advantages of ultrabroad frequency response, ultra-long sensing range and simple sensing structure due to the nature of forward transmission and coherent detection. The sensing length can be further extended to even trans-oceanic distances using more fiber spans and erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, making it a promising candidate for vibration event detection and localization in long-haul and ultra-long-haul fiber links.

Electro-optic (EO) modulators with a high modulation bandwidth are indispensable parts of an optical interconnect system. A key requirement for an energy-efficient EO modulator is the low drive voltage, which can be provided using a standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor circuity without an amplifying driver. Thin-film lithium niobate has emerged as a new promising platform, and shown its capable of achieving driverless and high-speed EO modulators. In this paper, we report a compact high-performance modulator based on the thin-film lithium niobate platform on a silicon substrate. The periodic capacitively loaded travelling-wave electrode is employed to achieve a large modulation bandwidth and a low drive voltage, which can support a driverless single-lane 100Gbaud operation. The folded modulation section design also helps to reduce the device length by almost two thirds. The fabricated device represents a large EO bandwidth of 45GHz with a half-wave voltage of 0.7V. The driverless transmission of a 100Gbaud 4-level pulse amplitude modulation signal is demonstrated with a power consumption of 4.49fj/bit and a bit-error rate below the KP4 forward-error correction threshold of 2.4×10⁻⁴.

The development of optical fiber technology has facilitated the technological innovation in optical fiber communication and sensing systems over the past decades. Among all the fiber sensing technologies, distributed optical fiber sensing (DOFS) has attracted great research interests and has been extensively investigated. In optical fiber communication systems, optical parameters such as intensity, phase, polarization, or frequency are modulated to realize data transmission, while for DOFS they are employed to measure the distributed physical parameter variation along the sensing fiber. Due to the similarities shared by optical fiber communication systems and DOFS systems, optical communication techniques, including coherent detection, polarization diversity and multicarrier signaling have been widely used in the DOFS to improve the sensing performance. In this article, principles of coherent detection, polarization diversity and multicarrier signaling are introduced and their applications in phase sensitive optical time domain reflectometry and Brillouin optical time domain analyzer are reviewed. A newly proposed unidirectional forward transmission based DOFS is also presented.

A compact and high-performance coarse wavelength-division multiplexing (CWDM) device is introduced with a footprint of 2.1 mm × 0.02 mm using an angled multimode interferometer structure based on a thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) platform. The demonstrated device built on a 400 nm thick x -cut TFLN shows ultra-low insertion losses of < 0.72 dB . Measured 3 dB bandwidths are 12.1 nm for all channels, and cross talks from adjacent channels are better than 18 dB. Its peak wavelength positions comply with the CWDM standard with a channel spacing of 20 nm. The filter bandwidth of the proposed CWDM device can be tuned by adjusting the structural parameters. This demonstrated CWDM device will promote future realization of multi-channel and multi-wavelength transmitter chips on TFLN.