High-contrast and accurate high-speed simulation of silicon-based modulators

Silicon-based optical modulator devices have experienced dramatic improvements over the last decade with data rates up to 50Gbps for On-Off-Keying (OOK) consuming ultra low power in fJ/bit [1-3]. The ability to fully understand the performances of these plasma dispersion effect-based devices from a simulation standpoint could be further improved especially in the coupling of high-speed electrical and optical effects. Here, we report an accurate methodology to study high-speed eye diagrams from the electrical and optical simulation data of individual silicon modulators. In particular, we demonstrate the capacity of this simulation methodology by applying it to the current state-of-the-art experimental demonstrated silicon optical modulator using OOK at 50Gbps [3].