Silicon photonic components on the COTTONTAIL chip

We report characterization results for our new silicon photonic chip for high-speed data transmission, called COTTONTAIL (Chip for detector instrumentation with wavelength division multiplex). Modulation bandwidths of different conventional and radiation-hardened travelling-wave Mach-Zehnder modulators are sufficient for very high data transmission rates. Wavelength filters for wavelength division multiplexing show a very low transmission loss of less than 2 dB with a slight wavelength shift of the filtering characteristics. Also included photodiodes are well suited for high speed downlinks in excess of 40 Gbps or on-chip modulator monitoring.