Enhancement of electro-optic modulators using traveling-wave resonators

Resonant enhancement of electro-optic modulators has been shown to greatly reduce the required switching voltage (V,) of these devices for narrow-band applications. Standing-wave resonantly enhanced modulators have been widely explored in the literature, but suffer from finite transit time effects and constraints on the active region length. Both of these effects limit their frequency of operation. A novel traveling-wave resonantly enhanced modulator is presented here that eliminates both of these problems. An implementation of the enhanced modulator using loss compensation is shown to reduce V-pi by a factor of 17.8, and reduce link loss in an analog radio-on-fiber link by 25 dB.