International Journal of

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Larger width of P-cladding layer in p-i-n waveguide of traveling wave electroabsorption modulator (TWEAM) results in lower resistance and microwave propagation loss which provides an enhanced high speed electro-optical response. In this paper, a fullvectorial finite-difference-based optical mode solver is presented to analyze mushroom-type TWEAM for the first time. In this analysis, the discontinuities of the normal components of the electric field across abrupt dielectric interfaces which are known as the limitations of scalar and semivectorial approximation methods are considered. The optical field distributions in mushroom-type TWEAM and conventional ridge-type TWEAM of the same active region for 1.55 μm operation are presented. The important parameters in the high-frequency TWEAM design such as optical effective index which defines optical velocity and transverse mode confinement factor are calculated. The modulation response of mushroom-type TWEAM is calculated by considering interaction of microwave and optical fields in waveguide and compared to that of conventional ridge-type TWEAM. The calculated 3dB bandwidths for ridge-type and mushroom-type TWEAM are about 139 GHz and 166 GHz for 200 μm and 114 GHz and 126 GHz for 300 μm waveguide length, respectively.

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We present the procedure for designing a high speed and low power all-optical analog to digital converter (AO-ADC), by integrating InGaAsP semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) with InP based photonic crystal (PhC) drop filters. The self-phase modulation in the SOA can shift the frequency of the Gaussian input pulse. The two output PhC based drop filters are designed to appropriately code the frequency-shifted analog signals by the SOA, converting them to four desired digital output levels. Our numerical results show that in an appropriately designed AO-ADC, the center wavelength (1572 nm) of an amplitude modulated Gaussian pulse of 1.8 ps width and 1.56 pJ energy can be shifted by 6.7 nm, by the SOA, and then be quantized and coded to four digital levels (00, 01, 10, and 11). The two point-defect PhC drop filters, compensating the effect of the frequency shift by SOA, minimize the AO-ADC integral and differential nonlinearity errors.