Auto Bias Control Technique for Silicon IQ Modulators Using the Dual-Arms Power Dithers

Abstract

In high-capacity coherent transmission applications such as 400 Gb/s and beyond, silicon inphase and quadrature modulators (SIQMs) are widely used as a coherent transmitter assembly. The bias points of the SIQM deviate the optimum points because of environmental change. Consequently, auto bias control (ABC) is an essential technique to stabilize the bias points of the SIQM. In this paper, we described a novel method to achieve the bias point high-precision control for SIQMs. First, a pair of the differential power dithers are applied to the dual-arms of the channels I and Q, which can compose a push-pull bias locking mode. By this way, the bias error of the channel P induced by the channels I and Q can be eliminated compared with the conventional single-arm ABC method. Then an orthogonal integration operation is used to extract the dither frequency component of the output signal of the SIQM, and the intersections of the orthogonal-integral curves corresponding to the bias points of the channels I, Q, and P are the optimum bias thermal-power. The simulation and experimental results show that our method exhibits a good performance for locking the optimum thermal-power of the SIQM, and the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) penalty caused by the proposed method for a 512-Gb/s optical signal transmission with a dual-polarization 16-quadrature amplitude modulation format can be neglected in our experiment.