Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Research Highlight
  • Published:

Silicon photonics

Beating the capacity crunch in optical links

Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering volume 2, page 520 (2025)Cite this article

Subjects

Access through your institution
Buy or subscribe

Microring modulators (MRMs) are promising for densely integrated high-speed electro-optical converters but are limited by their big frequency chirp and dynamic nonlinearity. They are therefore used mostly for intensity modulation. Phase modulation, however, offers wider bandwidth and smoother frequency response at resonance.

The team show that by nesting a pair of MRMs in a balanced Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) in a push–pull configuration, forming a microring-assisted Mach–Zehnder modulator (MRA-MZM), the frequency chirp issue can be overcome, and dynamic nonlinearity at high frequencies can be suppressed. Their device was fabricated using a complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible silicon photonics foundry process. The area occupied by the active components on the chip, including the MRMs, the photodetectors and the thermo-optic phase shifter that establishes the phase difference between the two arms, is merely 100 µm in width. Each MRM is amplitude shift keying-modulated to jointly generate a quadrature amplitude modulation signal. They demonstrate an ultra-compact, ultra-wide-bandwidth in-phase/quadrature modulator on a silicon chip with a 6-dB bandwidth greater than 60 GHz.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Access through your institution

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

References

Original article

  • Geravand, A. et al. Ultrafast coherent dynamics of microring modulators. Nat. Photon. 19, 740–750 (2025)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering https://www.nature.com/natrevelectreng/

    Rachel Won

Authors
  1. Rachel Won
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rachel Won.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Won, R. Beating the capacity crunch in optical links. Nat Rev Electr Eng 2, 520 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44287-025-00202-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44287-025-00202-5

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing