Open AccessAnalysis and Experimental Study of a Silicon Photonic Single MRM-Assisted MZI PAM-4 Modulator
Author(s) -
Rui Li,
David Patel,
Alireza Samani,
Eslam El-Fiky,
Yun Wang,
Zhenping Xing,
Luhua Xu,
David V. Plant
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
ieee photonics journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.725
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1943-0655
pISSN - 1943-0647
DOI - 10.1109/jphot.2017.2774763
Subject(s) - engineered materials, dielectrics and plasmas , photonics and electrooptics
We report on the analysis and experimental study of a silicon photonic single microring modulator (MRM) assisted Mach-Zehnder interferometer for high-speed four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4). The static extinction ratio (ER) of the proposed device is 18 dB larger than that of a single MRM with the same design parameters. Under 0 V reverse bias voltage, the measured 3-dB electro-optic bandwidth of the device is 20 GHz. Based on the enhancement of the ER, the measured 40 Gb/s on-off keying eye diagram of the device shows larger modulation amplitude than that of the single MRM. We further present 76 Gb/s PAM-4 using the proposed device in a back-to-back configuration, with the measured bit error rate below the hard-decision forward error correction threshold of 3.8 × 10-3.