High-Performance Thin-Film Lithium Niobate Mach–Zehnder Modulator on 8-inch Silicon Substrates

Lithium niobate modulators have primarily been fabricated on chip-level or 4/6-inch wafers. Here, thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) electro-optic Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) are demonstrated for the first time on an 8-inch silicon substrate. The fabricated LN modulator has an on-chip loss of less than 1 dB with a waveguide loss of lower than 0.5 dB/cm. The half-wave voltage- length product (V<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\pi \cdot $ </tex-math></inline-formula> L) is 3.12 V<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\cdot $ </tex-math></inline-formula> cm in the C-band at a 0.5 cm modulation length, and the corresponding 3-dB bandwidth of the electro-optic response is beyond 67 GHz. All specifications are state-of-the-art. These results provide the basis for the industrialization of the TFLN platform with better balance between performance and cost.