Integrated Hybrid Wavelength-Tunable III–V/Silicon Transmitter Based on a Ring-Assisted Mach–Zehnder Interferometer Modulator

Abstract

We demonstrate a wavelength-tunable hybrid III–V/Si transmitter based on a Vernier laser with more than 30 nm tuning range and two microring modulators nested in a Mach–Zehnder interferometer. This transmitter circuit has versatile operating modes. It can be used for on–off keying (OOK) generation based on low drive voltage push–pull ring modulators and for quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) generation where binary phase-shift keying signal is generated by each ring. We reported the first hybrid III–V/Si integrated wavelength-tunable transmitter based on high-speed ring modulators (BW ∼23 GHz), which can cover more than 30 nm. OOK signal generation with better signal integrity, lower drive voltage, and lower chirp is demonstrated as well as 80 Gbit/s polarization-division multiplexing QPSK signal transmission over 100 km with the integrated hybrid transmitter and a fully packaged silicon-based coherent receiver.