Silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) Mach-Zehnder modulators for 100 GBd PAM4 signaling with sub-1 dB phase-shifter loss

Abstract

We report on compact and efficient silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) with low phase-shifter insertion loss of 0.7 dB. The 280 µm-long phase shifters feature a π -voltage-length product of 0.41 Vmm and a loss-efficiency product as small as aUπL = 1.0 VdB. The device performance is demonstrated in a data transmission experiment, where we generate on-off-keying (OOK) and four-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4) signals at symbol rates of 100 GBd, resulting in line rates of up to 200 Gbit/s. Bit error ratios are below the threshold for hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) with 7% coding overhead, leading to net data rates of 187 Gbit/s. This is the highest PAM4 data rate ever achieved for a sub-1 mm silicon photonic MZM.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Aug 07, 2020
Source ID
10.1364/oe.390315

Entities

People

  • Carsten Eschenbaum
  • Christian Koos
  • Christoph Füllner
  • Clemens Kieninger
  • Delwin L Elder
  • Heiner Zwickel
  • Juned Kemal
  • Larry Dalton
  • Sebastian Randel
  • Wolfgang Freude
  • Yasar Kutuvantavida

Organizations

  • Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation
  • European Research Council
  • Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space
  • German Research Foundation
  • Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Optical Physics and Photonics.
  • Radio communications and signal processing.

Technology Areas

  • Quantum Science - Quantum Key Distribution