High-speed low-chirp PAM-4 transmission based on push-pull silicon photonic microring modulators

We report a silicon photonic modulator based on the use of dual parallel microring modulators (MRMs) inserted in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI). It is operated in a push-pull configuration for low-chirp transmission at approximately 1550 nm. The chirp parameters of the device are measured using...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Optics express 2017-06, Vol.25 (12), p.13222-13229
Main Authors: Li, Rui, Patel, David, El-Fiky, Eslam, Samani, Alireza, Xing, Zhenping, Morsy-Osman, Mohamed, Plant, David V
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:We report a silicon photonic modulator based on the use of dual parallel microring modulators (MRMs) inserted in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI). It is operated in a push-pull configuration for low-chirp transmission at approximately 1550 nm. The chirp parameters of the device are measured using 10 Gb/s on-off keying (OOK) transmission over 20 km of standard single mode fiber (SSMF), and they are less than 0.01, showing the low-chirp characteristic of the modulator. We further demonstrate four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) transmission at 92 Gb/s over 1 km of SSMF and at 40 Gb/s over 20 km of SSMF. The measured bit error rates (BERs) are below the hard-decision (HD) forward error correction (FEC) threshold of 3.8 × 10 .
ISSN:1094-4087
1094-4087
DOI:10.1364/oe.25.013222