Demonstration of Vpi Reduction in Electrooptic Modulators using Modulation Instability

Reduction in the operating voltage of electrooptic modulators is needed in order to remove the bottleneck in the flow of data between electronics and optical interconnects. We report experimental demonstration of a 10 fold reduction in an electrooptic modulator’s half-wave voltage up to 50 GHz. This was achieved by employing optical sideband-only amplification.