Abstract

Many optical modulators achieve improved performance when used in a Fabry-Perot (FP) configuration^[1-3]. This is due to the increased interaction of the light with the modulator active material. A conventional FP modulator consists of an active layer (electrooptic, electroabsorptive, or optically active material) acting as a cavity sandwiched between two dielectric or metal mirrors. To increase the interaction in the cavity, higher reflectance mirrors are required resulting in higher finesse cavities^[4]. However, as the finesse increases, the cavity thickness tolerance decreases. This proves to be a serious practical limitation when building large size and/or large arrays of FP modulators (e.g. wafer size). Only when fabrication techniques that create materials one monolayer at a time are used does it become possible to build uniform FP modulator arrays.

© 1995 Optical Society of America