Beyond 100G Single Sideband PAM-4 Transmission With Silicon Dual-Drive MZM

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate beyond 100G single sideband (SSB) 4-ary pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) signal generation with a silicon dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DD-MZM) operating at C-band. With Kramers-Kronig detection, a 128-Gb/s PAM-4 signal is transmitted over 80-km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) with a bit error rate (BER) below the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold of 3.8 × 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-3</sup> . In comparison, a 168-Gb/s PAM-4 signal is transmitted over 80-km SSMF with a BER below the 20% HD-FEC threshold of 1.5 × 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-2</sup> . A two-tap digital post filter and maximum likelihood sequence detection are applied to compensate for the limited system bandwidth. To the best of our knowledge, this letter reports the highest single-lane bitrate of 80-km SSB transmission with a DD-MZM and direct detection. It provides an attractive low-cost solution for inter-datacenter interconnection and metro-haul transmission.