Investigation of Interplay between Driving Voltage of MZ Modulators and Bandwidth of Low-pass Filters in Duobinary Modulation Formats

Abstract

We have theoretically investigated the effects of the interplay between the driving voltage of Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulators and the bandwidth of low-pass filters (LPF) in 10[Gb/s] duobinary modulation systems. For the change of driving voltage ratios(driving voltage/ switching voltage), the transmission performance has been evaluated over 200[㎞] of single-mode fiber(SMF) systems. For driving voltage ratios with smaller than 100[%], the transmission performance has been maintained and greatly affected by the bandwidth of LPFs than the driving voltage. For driving voltage ratios with larger than 100[%], the transmission performance has been degraded and is not sensitive to the bandwidth of LPFs. To see the limitation of driving voltage, we have reduced the driving voltage ratio to 50[%]. Our results suggest that 10[Gb/s] duobinary signals with driving voltage ratio with smaller than 100[%] have been transmitted over 200[km] SMF within 2[㏈] power penalty without dispersion compensation. For the driving voltage ratio with 50[%], we have verified that the transmission performance was maintained.