Electro-optic modulators (EOMs) are pivotal in bridging electrical and optical domains, essential for diverse applications including optical communication, microwave signal processing, sensing, and quantum technologies. However, achieving the trifecta of high-density integration, cost-effectiveness, and superior performance remains challenging within established integrated photonics platforms. Enter thin-film lithium niobate (LN), a recent standout with its inherent electro-optic (EO) efficiency, proven industrial performance, durability, and rapid fabrication advancements. This platform inherits material advantages from traditional bulk LN devices while offering a reduced footprint, wider bandwidths, and lower power requirements. Despite its recent introduction, commercial thin-film LN wafers already rival or surpass established alternatives like silicon and indium phosphide, benefitting from decades of research. In this review, we delve into the foundational principles and technical innovations driving state-of-the-art LN modulator demonstrations, exploring various methodologies, their strengths, and challenges. Furthermore, we outline pathways for further enhancing LN modulators and anticipate exciting prospects for larger-scale LN EO circuits beyond singular components. By elucidating the current landscape and future directions, we highlight the transformative potential of thin-film LN technology in advancing electro-optic modulation and integrated photonics.

A modulator is the core of many optoelectronic applications such as communication and sensing. However, a traditional modulator can hardly reach high modulation depth. In order to achieve the higher modulation depth, a graphene electro-optical switch modulator is proposed by adjusting propagation length in the near infrared band. The switch modulator is designed based on a hybrid plasmonic waveguide structure, which is comprised of an SiO₂ substrate, graphene–Si–graphene heterostructure, Ag nanowire and SiO₂ cladding. The propagation length of the hybrid plasmonic waveguide varies from 0.14 μm to 20.43 μm by the voltage tunability of graphene in 1550 nm incident light. A modulator with a length of 3 μm is designed based on the hybrid waveguide and it achieves about 100% modulation depth. The lower energy loss (~1.71 fJ/bit) and larger 3 dB bandwidth (~83.91 GHz) are attractive for its application in a photoelectric integration field. In addition, the excellent robustness (error of modulation effects lower than 8.84%) is practical in the fabrication process. Most importantly, by using the method of adjusting propagation length, other types of graphene modulators can also achieve about 100% modulation depth.

The bias temperature instability (BTI) effect of p-GaN gate high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) is a serious problem for reliability. To uncover the essential cause of this effect, in this paper, we precisely monitored the shifting process of the threshold voltage (V_TH) of HEMTs under BTI stress by fast sweeping characterizations. The HEMTs without time-dependent gate breakdown (TDGB) stress featured a high V_TH shift of 0.62 V. In contrast, the HEMT that underwent 424 s of TDGB stress clearly saw a limited V_TH shift of 0.16 V. The mechanism is that the TDGB stress can induce a Schottky barrier lowering effect on the metal/p-GaN junction, thus boosting the hole injection from the gate metal to the p-GaN layer. This hole injection eventually improves the V_TH stability by replenishing the holes lost under BTI stress. It is the first time that we experimentally proved that the BTI effect of p-GaN gate HEMTs was directly dominated by the gate Schottky barrier that impeded the hole supply to the p-GaN layer.

Hyperbolic materials can be used to excite hyperbolic phonon polaritons in specific frequency bands, which causes abrupt interfaces with fluctuations of permittivity and different transmission characteristics at different incident wavelengths. Using the quasi-static approximation, the filtering characteristics of hexagonal Boron nitride (h-BN) and the transmission characteristics of phonon polaritons waves on a dielectric-h-BN-dielectric structure were studied in the paper. The results show that a smaller relative permittivity of the materials above and below h-BN and a thicker h-BN (ε₁ = 1 (air), ε₂ = 3.9 (SiO₂), d = 100 nm) will lead to better filtering characteristics for different wavenumbers’ incident waves (propagation length from 0.0028 μm to 1.9756 μm). Simulation results in COMSOL validated the previous theoretical calculations. Moreover, the transmissivity and 3dB bandwidth of the type-II band were calculated with different structure widths. The maximum transmissivity of ~99% appears at a width of 100 nm, and the minimum 3dB bandwidth reaches 86.35 cm⁻¹ at a structure width of 1300 nm. When the structure width meets or exceeds 1700 nm, the 3dB bandwidth is equal to 0, and its structure length is the limit for the filter application. These characteristics reveal the excellent filtering characteristics of the dielectric-h-BN-dielectric structure, and reveal the great potential of using the dielectric-h-BN-dielectric structure to design optical filter devices with excellent performance in mid-infrared bands.