Abstract

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 Vπ under 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-silicon IQM. Employing only electronic equalization and single-segment IQM preserves the conventional architecture of coherent networks and transceivers, and highlights the potential of SiP as a platform for next-generation 800G applications.

Single-carrier 72 GBaud 32QAM and 84 GBaud 16QAM transmission using a SiP IQ modulator with joint digital-optical pre-compensation

Jiachuan Lin, Hassan Sepehrian, Leslie A. Rusch, and Wei Shi
Opt. Express 27(4) 5610-5619 (2019)

120-GBaud 16-QAM silicon photonics IQ modulator for data center interconnection

Jian Wang, Mustafa Al-Qadi, Wen-Jr Jiang, Kangmei Li, You-Wei Chen, Konstantin Kuzmin, Calvin Ho, Yan Yang Zhao, Hiroaki Yamada, Jason Ackert, David Dougherty, Weilin Liu, Chengkun Chen, Yifeng Zhou, Ping Wang, Xu Liu, Kevin Schmidt, Jocelyn Nee, Kenneth A. McGreer, Marcel Boudreau, Jibin Sun, Winston I. Way, and Hui Xu
Opt. Express 31(16) 25515-25526 (2023)

Net 400-Gbps/λ IMDD transmission using a single-DAC DSP-free transmitter and a thin-film lithium niobate MZM

Essam Berikaa, Md Samiul Alam, and David V. Plant
Opt. Lett. 47(23) 6273-6276 (2022)

800  Gbit/s transmission over 1  km single-mode fiber using a four-channel silicon photonic transmitter

Hongguang Zhang, Miaofeng Li, Yuguang Zhang, Di Zhang, Qiwen Liao, Jian He, Shenglei Hu, Bo Zhang, Lei Wang, Xi Xiao, Nan Qi, and Shaohua Yu
Photon. Res. 8(11) 1776-1782 (2020)

100G and 200G single carrier transmission over 2880 and 320 km using an InP IQ modulator and Stokes vector receiver

Mohammed Y. S. Sowailem, Thang M. Hoang, Mathieu Chagnon, Mohamed Morsy-Osman, Meng Qiu, Stephane Paquet, Carl Paquet, Ian Woods, Odile Liboiron-Ladouceur, and David V. Plant
Opt. Express 24(26) 30485-30493 (2016)