Abstract
We establish experimentally the suitability of an all-silicon optical modulator to support future ultra-high-capacity coherent optical transmission links beyond 400 Gb/s. We present single-carrier data transmission from 400 Gb/s to 600 Gb/s using an all-silicon IQ modulator produced with a generic foundry process. The operating point of the silicon photonic transmitter is carefully optimized to find the best efficiency bandwidth trade-off. We present a methodology to split pre-compensation between digital and optical stages. For the 400 Gb/s transmission, we achieved 60 Gbaud dual-polarization (DP)-16QAM, reaching a distance of 1,520 km. Transmission of 500 Gb/s was further tested using 75 Gbaud 16QAM and 60 Gbaud 32QAM, reaching 1,120 km and 480 km, respectively. We finally demonstrated 72 Gbaud DP-32QAM (720 Gb/s) transmitted over 160 km and 84 Gbaud DP-16QAM (672 Gb/s) transmitted over 720 km, meeting the threshold for 20% forward error correction overhead and achieving net rates of 600 Gb/s and 576 Gb/s, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, these are the highest baud-rate coherent transmission results achieved using an all-silicon IQ modulator. We have demonstrated that we can reap the myriad advantages of SiP integration for transmission at extreme bit rates.
Highlights
The exponential growth of global data traffic to meet the demand of cloud computing, mobile Internet, Internet of things, and artificial intelligence, drives optical networks towards a single line rate of 400G-1Tb and beyond
The ripples of the frequency response are caused by the imperfect RF impedance matching in the modulator and RF probing, which can be suppressed using digital pre-compensation
These data formats allow single carrier transmission tests with raw bit rates ranging from 480 Gb/s to 720 Gb/s
Summary
The exponential growth of global data traffic to meet the demand of cloud computing, mobile Internet, Internet of things, and artificial intelligence, drives optical networks towards a single line rate of 400G-1Tb and beyond. High-baud-rate, single-carrier transmission has been extensively explored on photonic integration platforms, such as InP for 100 Gbaud 32QAM [5], 77 Gbaud 32QAM [6] and 120 Gbaud QPSK (quaternary phase shift keying) [7], thin film polymer on silicon for 90 Gbaud QPSK [8] and organic hybrid for 100 Gbaud 16QAM [9]. We examine high-baud-rate QAM transmission using a silicon traveling-wave (TW) IQ (in phase/quadrature) modulator optimized based on a CMOS-compatible large-wafer photonics fabrication process.
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