We demonstrate an optoelectronic microwave oscillator based on the integrated plasmon assisted Si-ITO electrooptical modulator on silicon-on-insulator platform. Modulator of this type has a big potential for compact low-noise microwave oscillator applications due to extremely small active length, of about several microns, and up to 40 GHz bandwidth. Microwave spectra and phase noise of the resulting signal have been measured and modeled for three different lengths of the optical fiber delay lines of 43, 93 and 193 meters. The phase noise of -62.84, -72.03 and -82.32 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset has been achieved at 8.251 GHz frequency, which is in good correspondence with the modeling. That paves a way for fabrication of integrated, dramatically miniaturized and broadband tunable optoelectronic oscillators by combining the modulator with silicon-based widely tunable integrated optical filters on the same chip. In addition, we believe that the demonstration of such a compact Si-ITO plasmonic modulator as a part of an optoelectronic oscillator would be an important step towards the integration of transparent conductive oxide-based modulators into more complicated systems.
Smirnov et al. (2026) studied this question.