Large Bandwidth Visible Electro-Optic Modulator for Data Transmission

We report the development of the world's first singlemode optical fiber-coupled, fully-packaged visible light electrooptic modulator, capable of operating across the 500–700 nm spectrum. At a wavelength of 633 nm, the modulator exhibits a measured insertion loss of 7.6 dB, an extinction ratio of 27 dB, and a 3 dB bandwidth of 31.5 GHz. Digital data transmission was successfully demonstrated on the modulator, with data rate of 12 Gbs<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-1</sup> and RF drive voltage of only 2 V peak-to-peak voltage, the bit error rate (BER) was measured to be less than 3.7 × 10<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-5</sup>.