Duobinary IQ Modulation Schemes for C- and O-band PAM4 Direct Detect Systems

Chagnon, Mathieu; Eriksson, Tobias A.; Dischler, Roman; Buchali, Fred; Bülow, H.; Brink, Stephan ten

doi:10.1109/ecoc.2017.8346160

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

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“…Moving the DAC-operation to the optical domain would remove the linearity requirements at the transmitter, reducing the complexity of the electrical front-end and its power consumption. Recently, several optical DACs have been proposed using a segmented Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) [9], parallel MZMs [10,11], silicon ring modulators [12,13], Si-on-IIIV electro-absorption modulated distributed feedback laser (EML DFB) [14] or by using polarization division multiplexing (PDM) for the least and most significant bit (LSB and MSB) [15,16]. Although the MZMbased solutions show good performance, they might not be suited for short-reach interconnects as they typically require large transmission line structures and dedicated, powerconsuming terminations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

DAC-Less and DSP-Free 112 Gb/s PAM-4 Transmitter Using Two Parallel Electroabsorption Modulators

Verbist

Lambrecht

Verplaetse

et al. 2018

J. Lightwave Technol.

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Four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) is widely regarded as the modulation format of choice for the next generation of 400 gigabit Ethernet short-reach optical transceiver. However, generating and receiving PAM-4 at line rates of 112 Gb/s has proven challenging, without relying on power-hungry tools as digital signal processing and digital-to-analog converters, as it requires linearity from the E/O-components in the link and/or predistortion techniques. Moving the binary to multilevel conversion to the optical domain would greatly relax these requirements. Electro-absorption based transceivers would be ideally suited for this type of data center interconnects as they are capable of combining low-power and high bandwidth operation with a very compact layout, removing the need for large travelling wave structures and dedicated 50Ω terminations. In this paper, we present a novel transmitter topology for generating PAM-4 using two binary driven electro-absorption modulators in parallel. Using this approach, we achieve superior performance with respect to a single, but identical multilevel driven EAM. Finally, we demonstrate the first silicon-based modulator capable of transmitting single-lane 112 Gb/s PAM-4 over 2 km of standard single-mode fiber without any electrical DAC, DSP or long transmission line structures and terminations.

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