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Electro-Optic: Coupled Wave Modulators
Electro-Optic: Coupled Wave Modulators
Gambar chapter 9
294 Chapter 9
If the two waveguides are identical and there is no modulating field present then
there will be perfect. phase-match between the waveguides. When an optical input is
supplied to guide a, and there is no input to guide b, there is progressive transfer of
energy from guide a to guide b as the input wave travels along the coupling region
until the distance traveled is z = xl2C, at which point all the energy has been transferred
to guide b. If the length of the coupling region is made equal to xl2C, the device then
acts as a switch in the same way as the passive switch does in Section 9.4.2.
As soon as a voltage is applied to the modulator electrodes, the electric field
below the electrodes produces an imbalance in the propagation velocities in the two
waveguides and phase-match is lost. For a small mismatch AB,the effect is to reduce
the power transferred by a small amount so that imperfect switching results. For a
large mismatch virtually no power is transferred out of the input guide and negligible
switching results. Thus if the length of rhe coupling region is set to L = r/2C, and a
rectangular wave is applied to the electrodes, a switching modulator results.
In principle, it is possible to obtain complete return of the input power to the
input guide by adjusting the magnitude of the applied modulating field. To see this we
return to (9.25a):
from which it can be seen that in the unmatched condition when /B * 0 the power coupled
into the second guide is 0 when
so that L can be chosen to give complete transfer of power to the second guide
output in the absence of a modulating voltage and AB can be chosen to give zero transfer
of power in the presence of a modulating voltage.
We define the switching crosstalk as the ratio of the power transferred to the
second guide in the presence of a modulating voltage, to the power transferred in the
absence of the modulating voltage. Crosstalk levels better than -30 db are achievable
in real devices.
The switching voltage is not very critical to obtaining good crosstalk performance,
but the technology of matching the physical lengrh of the coupling region to the
coupling coefficient C is critical and difficult. A simple modification of the basic
modulator geometryl'2 to that in Figure 9.5(b) removes this critical dependence on
processing technology. This form of modulator is known as the reverse AB modulator.
The electrodes are split into two sections so that in guide a AB changes sign from positive
to negative when the input wave reaches the halfway point along the coupling region,
and the wave traveling in guide b sees the opposite change in AB as it travels through
the coupling region.
To see how this modulator works we rerurn ro (9.24), (9.25) and (9.28) to
describe the coupling between guides.
When two guide structures are connected in tandem, as in the reverse /Bmodulator, the
overall system is described by
*6"ts 15(l)l describes the first half of the modulator and lG(2)l describes rhe second
half. It is convenient to rewrite these equations suppressing the phase terms in the G
matrices, by defining variables R(z) and S(z) as
We now define two alternative states € and @ to describe the fully unswitched and
fully switched states of the reverse /Bmodulator. The modulator is in the @ state when