A photonic integrated circuit (PIC) is a microchip containing multiple photonic components to form specific functionalities, including generating, transporting, manipulating, and detecting light. A conventional material platform for PICs includes indium phosphide (InP), silicon nitride (SiN), and silicon photonics (SiPh). TFLN is a newly emerged material platform for PICs, which combines the excellent electro-optic characteristics of the lithium niobate crystal with ultra-low loss, compact optical waveguides, enabling high-performance PICs to be fabricated that significantly outperform existing materials and technologies in terms of insertion loss, optical and electrical bandwidths, electro-optical modulation efficiency, and power consumption – key parameters for applications ranging from optical communications, data interconnects, to integrated optical sensors. Liobate leads the field of fabrication of such PICs on TFLN substrate.

Lithium niobate (LN) crystal has been widely used to fabricate electro-optical (EO) modulators for optical communications and other applications. However, conventional LN EO modulators require high driving voltages (hence have high power consumption). They are also large, requiring more installation space and making achieving high modulation bandwidths difficult.
TFLN PIC technology allows for compact optical waveguides to be monolithically fabricated, reducing the gap between electrodes, resulting in much lower driving voltage (hence much lower power consumption) and much smaller device length. The reduced length is desirable to reduction of equipment size and is critical to achieving high modulation bandwidths.
Liobate’s TFLN modulators readily achieve sub-1-volt driving voltages and/or bandwidths over 100 GHz. Our TFLN PIC technology allows the production of DP IQ modulators for complex modulation formats used in coherent and polarization multiplexed systems.
One of the key issues related to LN electro-optical devices is the bias drift problem, in which the bias point of LN modulators changes over time when applying a DC voltage.
Liobate has developed proprietary technologies that successfully eliminate this adverse effect. The resulting EO modulator devices demonstrate highly stable and repeatable bias points, as shown below.

Our TFLN technology can support high density photonic integration. We can fabricate various passive devices, including ultra-low loss optical waveguides, high-quality micro-resonators, low-loss optical Bragg grating waveguides, 3 dB optical beam splitters, wavelength multiplexers/de-multiplexers and polarization handling devices on our TFLN platform. Moreover, we can fabricate highly sophisticated photonic integrated circuits with monolithically integrated passive devices with multi-channel high speed EO modulators. This capability can unlock many new application possibilities on this platform.

Packaging technologies that maintain the excellent characteristics of the TFLN PIC chips are key to their applications. Low and highly repeatable fiber-chip coupling loss, high electrical bandwidth, and hybrid integration of active components such as lasers and detectors for very small form factor modules are critical for many practical applications.
Liobate has developed proprietary packaging technologies that successfully satisfy these demanding requirements, allowing the production of high-performance EO modulators and optical transceiver modules for optical communications, data interconnect, and optical sensing applications.