Ultrahigh-Net-Bitrate 363 Gbit/s PAM-8 and 279 Gbit/s Polybinary Optical Transmission Using Plasmonic Mach-Zehnder Modulator
Qian Hu, Robert Borkowski, Yannick Lefevre, Junho Cho, Fred Buchali, R. Bonk, Karsten Schuh, Eva De Leo, Patrick Habegger, Marcel Destraz, Nino Del Medico, Hamit Duran, Valentino Tedaldi, Christian Funck, Yuriy Fedoryshyn, Juerg Leuthold, Wolfgang Heni, Benedikt Baeuerle, Claudia Hoessbacher
Abstract
We summarize our experimental exploration of the capabilities of an ultrabroad-bandwidth plasmonic Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM), in an intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) system for short-reach optical transmission up to 10 km. We study modulation, transmission, and reception of ultrahigh-symbol-rate (up to 304 GBd) multi-level optical signals with two different signaling schemes: pulse amplitude modulation (PAM), with up to 8 amplitude levels and partial-response-encoded binary (polybinary) modulation with memory length up to 4. By mapping the performance to a concatenated soft-decision (SD) and hard-decision (HD) forward error correction (FEC) coding scheme, a net bitrate of 363.4 Gbit/s is possible with PAM-8 signaling and 279.0 Gbit/s with tetrabinary (polybinary) signaling after 10 km standard single-mode fiber transmission. Considering an HD-only coding scheme, a net bitrate of 318.0 Gbit/s is possible with PAM-6 and 277.1 Gbit/s with tetrabinary.