Silicon monolithic acousto-optic modulator

This paper reports on the co-fabrication of RF MEMS radial contour mode resonators and photonic whispering gallery mode disk resonators on the same SOI substrate. By mechanically coupling the MEMS and photonic resonators, we have demonstrated a silicon acousto-optic modulator (AOM) which can modulate a 1550 nm laser at 288 MHz. An output RF power of -83.7 dBm is observed corresponding to a modulation of ±415 nW around a biased optical output of 3.98 ¿W. The AOM has a footprint of 50 ¿m × 30 ¿m and bandwidth of 24.2 kHz in vacuum due to a high mechanical quality factor (Q) of 11,890.