Experimental study of 112 Gb/s short reach transmission employing PAM formats and SiP intensity modulator at 13 μm

Abstract

We present a Silicon Photonic (SiP) intensity modulator operating at 1.3 μm with pulse amplitude modulation formats for short reach transmission employing a digital to analog converter for the RF signal generator, enabling pulse shaping and precompensation of the transmitter's frequency response. Details of the SiP Mach-Zehnder interfometer are presented. We study the system performance at various bit rates, PAM orders and propagation distances. To the best of our knowledge, we report the first demonstration of a 112 Gb/s transmission over 10 km of SMF fiber operating below pre-FEC BER threshold of 3.8 × 10(-3) employing PAM-8 at 37.4 Gbaud using a fully packaged SiP modulator. An analytical model for the Q-factor metric applicable for multilevel PAM-N signaling is derived and accurately experimentally verified in the case of Gaussian noise limited detection. System performance is experimentally investigated and it is demonstrated that PAM order selection can be optimally chosen as a function of the desired throughput. We demonstrate the ability of the proposed transmitter to exhibit software-defined transmission for short reach applications by selecting PAM order, symbol rate and pulse shape.

Toward 1.8 Tb/s CAP Schemes for Short Reach Optical Communication Systems

“…In fact, 100 Gbit/s bit rate has been addressed comprehensively for this application [1][2][3][4] while discussion has been actively started for 400 Gbit/s and above data links [5][6]. To reduce the cost of the optical data link, directly modulated lasers with direct detection (DD) schemes have been adopted [7][8][9][10].…”

Time-Domain Large-Signal Modeling of Traveling-Wave Modulators on SOI

“…Among various modulator structures demonstrated on silicon-on-insulator (SOI), Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) applying traveling-wave (TW) electrodes remain the easiest to implement for commercial optical communications systems, because they are much less thermally sensitive than resonant devices and require fewer RF connections than those using distributed drivers [4,5]. Bit rates above 100 Gb/s have recently been achieved using SiP TW modulators with pulsed-amplitude modulation [6] and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats [7].…”

Dual phase-shift Bragg grating silicon photonic modulator operating up to 60 Gb/s

“…The main advantages of MZMs are typically its wide optical bandwidth, low chirp and small temperature sensitivity, while MRMs are characterized by small footprint and low power consumption. The use of higher modulation formats is an additional means to increase the capacity of high speed short data links and, recently, high speed pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) has been demonstrated using MZMs [11][12][13], segmented electrode MZMs [14] and MRMs [8]. PAM is of particular interest due to its high spectral efficiency and compatibility with direct detection [15].…”