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Abstract

The emerging research conducted on silicon photonics has emphasized its potential to utilize low cost, mature and mass productive CMOS processes. Among all of the silicon photonics devices, the silicon modulator is one of the important components in optical communication network. In this paper, Multimode Interference (MMI) device is used to develop the Mach Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) structure of the optical modulator. The electrical part of the modulator utilizes the forward biased P-I-N structure. The effects of varying the waveguide s width of the MMI couplers to the performance of the MZI optical modulator on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) were investigated. The analyses were done on the insertion loss (IL), extinction ratio (ER) and modulation efficiency (VpL) of the device. The investigated waveguide s widths were 3, 4 and 5 5m. Largest waveguide s width of the MMI, which was 5 5m demonstrated the best performance with IL of 3.63 dB, ER of 28.81 dB and VpL of 0.0315 Vcm.