Our doctoral fellow, Shivaprasad Hulyal, presented his latest work on a 1.6 Tbps integrated photonic transmitter based on thin-film lithium tantalate (LTOI) at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC 2026), one of the world’s leading forums for optical communications and networking technologies.
The work introduces a fully integrated AWG–modulator–AWG architecture, enabling on-chip wavelength-division multiplexing and high-speed electro-optic modulation within a compact footprint. By combining broadband wavelength routing with the high-performance Pockels effect of lithium tantalate, the demonstrated platform achieves terabit-per-second data generation on a single chip.
This result highlights lithium tantalate as a powerful emerging platform for scalable, high-throughput optical transmitters, offering a pathway toward energy-efficient, densely integrated photonic systems. The approach is particularly relevant for next-generation data center and AI interconnects, where bandwidth density and system scalability are critical.
The presentation attracted strong interest at OFC, reflecting the growing momentum toward integrated, comb-compatible photonic architectures for future communication systems.
