As bit rates of optical interconnects increase, a large
amount of complicated signal conditioning is needed to compensate for the insufficient bandwidth of current modulators. In
this paper, we evaluate the reduced equalization requirements of
high-bandwidth plasmonic modulators in short-reach transmission
experiments. It is shown that transmission of 100 Gbit/s nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) and 112 Gbit/s pulse-amplitude modulation4 over 1 km and 2 km distance is possible without any receiver
equalization. At higher bit-rates, such as 120 Gbit/s NRZ, data
transmission is demonstrated over 500 m with reduced receiver
equalization requirements. Transmission up to 200 Gbit/s over
1 km is also shown with more complex receiver equalization. The
reduced complexity of the receiver digital signal processing is attributed to a flat frequency response of at least 108 GHz of the
plasmonic modulators. All single wavelength transmissions have
been performed at 1540 nm in standard single mode fiber
