848 research outputs found
Silicon-Organic Hybrid (SOH) Mach-Zehnder Modulators for 100 Gbit/s On-Off Keying
Electro-optic modulators for high-speed on-off keying (OOK) are key
components of short- and mediumreach interconnects in data-center networks.
Besides small footprint and cost-efficient large-scale production, small drive
voltages and ultra-low power consumption are of paramount importance for such
devices. Here we demonstrate that the concept of silicon-organic hybrid (SOH)
integration is perfectly suited for meeting these challenges. The approach
combines the unique processing advantages of large-scale silicon photonics with
unrivalled electro-optic (EO) coefficients obtained by molecular engineering of
organic materials. In our proof-of-concept experiments, we demonstrate
generation and transmission of OOK signals with line rates of up to 100 Gbit/s
using a 1.1 mm-long SOH Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) which features a
{\pi}-voltage of only 0.9 V. This experiment represents not only the first
demonstration of 100 Gbit/s OOK on the silicon photonic platform, but also
leads to the lowest drive voltage and energy consumption ever demonstrated at
this data rate for a semiconductor-based device. We support our experimental
results by a theoretical analysis and show that the nonlinear transfer
characteristic of the MZM can be exploited to overcome bandwidth limitations of
the modulator and of the electric driver circuitry. The devices are fabricated
in a commercial silicon photonics line and can hence be combined with the full
portfolio of standard silicon photonic devices. We expect that high-speed
power-efficient SOH modulators may have transformative impact on short-reach
optical networks, enabling compact transceivers with unprecedented energy
efficiency that will be at the heart of future Ethernet interfaces at Tbit/s
data rates
Comb-based WDM transmission at 10 Tbit/s using a DC-driven quantum-dash mode-locked laser diode
Chip-scale frequency comb generators have the potential to become key
building blocks of compact wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transceivers
in future metropolitan or campus-area networks. Among the various comb
generator concepts, quantum-dash (QD) mode-locked laser diodes (MLLD) stand out
as a particularly promising option, combining small footprint with simple
operation by a DC current and offering flat broadband comb spectra. However,
the data transmission performance achieved with QD-MLLD was so far limited by
strong phase noise of the individual comb tones, restricting experiments to
rather simple modulation formats such as quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK)
or requiring hard-ware-based compensation schemes. Here we demonstrate that
these limitations can be over-come by digital symbol-wise phase tracking
algorithms, avoiding any hardware-based phase-noise compensation. We
demonstrate 16QAM dual-polarization WDM transmission on 38 channels at an
aggregate net data rate of 10.68 Tbit/s over 75 km of standard single-mode
fiber. To the best of our knowledge, this corresponds to the highest data rate
achieved through a DC-driven chip-scale comb generator without any
hardware-based phase-noise reduction schemes
- …