High Baud Rate Transmission With Silicon Photonic Modulators
Fan Zhang, Lei Zhang, Xiaoke Ruan, Fan Yang, Ming Hao, Yanping Li
Abstract
We review high baud rate operation of silicon photonic modulators with emphasis on short-reach and metro-haul applications. The current status of both devices and digital signal processing are discussed. The basic design of a typical carrier-depletion-based dual-drive traveling-wave Mach-Zehnder modulator (TW-MZM) is studied by simulation. Based on an all-silicon TW-MZM, we report the transmission experiments of high baud rate single sideband 4-ary pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) signals with linear equalization and artificial neural network based equalization, respectively. Our work indicates all-silicon modulators can address the requirements of future optical communication systems operating at 100 Gbaud.