Silicon Photonic Single-Segment IQ Modulator for Net 1 Tbps/λ Transmission Using All-Electronic Equalization

作者：Essam Berikaa, Md Samiul Alam, Alireza Samani, Eslam El‐Fiky, Yixiang Hu, Stéphane Lessard, David V. Plant · 发表于：Journal of Lightwave Technology · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1109/jlt.2022.3191244 · 被引用次数：23 · 研究领域：Optical Network Technologies、Photonic and Optical Devices、Advanced Photonic Communication Systems

There is a continuous need to scale optical communication networks' capacity to cope with the exponential growth of data traffic. Silicon photonics (SiP) retains significant potential as a platform for optical transceivers due to its CMOS compatibility, despite its limited electro-optic bandwidth and high driving voltage requirements. Here we present the design and characterization of two single-segment C-band SiP in-phase quadrature modulators (IQM) that differ in the phase shifter length, and we analyze the design tradeoffs based on their transmission performance.The large-signal transmission experiments indicate that the long IQM supports higher data transmission rates, which has 36 GHz 6-dB bandwidth and 10.5 V DC Vπunder 1 V reverse bias.With all-electronic equalization and on a single polarization, we transmit net 413 Gbps (95 Gbaud 32QAM) over 80 km of standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) under the 14.8% overhead concatenated forward error correction (C-FEC) BER threshold of 1.25 × 10−2. Using dual-polarization (DP) emulation and lookup table-based non-linear pre-distortion (NLPD), we demonstrate the transmission of 95 Gbaud DP-32QAM and 115 Gbaud DP-16QAM over 80 km of SSMF below the C-FEC BER threshold, corresponding to net rates of 827 Gbps and 800 Gbps, respectively. Moreover, we transmit 105 Gbaud DP-64QAM over 80 km below the 25% overhead soft-decision (SD) FEC BER threshold of 5 × 10−2; featuring the first demonstration of net 1 Tbps transmission using an all-silic...