High-Speed Coplanar Waveguide Based Submount for 40 Gbit/s Electroabsorption Modulator

A high-speed submount has been designed and fabricated for 40 Gb/s electroabsorption (EA) modulators. The submount contains a coplanar waveguide (CPW) for microwave signal feeding and a Ta₂N thin-film resistor for impedance matching. The CPW transmission line is designed to ensure low microwave loss and reflection, and Ti/Cu/Ni/Au metal is adopted for electrode fabrication to guarantee good contact with the Ta₂N thin-film. The typical reflection coefficient of fabricated submount is estimated to be lower than−21 dB up to 40 GHz. As a demonstration, a high-speed EA modulator was chip-level packaged using the high-speed submount, and the measured small-signal modulation bandwidth was over 40 GHz.