Performance Comparison Between All-Pass and IQ Optical Modulation

• Published in: Journal of lightwave technology Vol. 42; no. 1; pp. 1 - 7
• Main Authors: Saxena, B., Farley, K., Reimer, M. A., Hubbard, M., O'Sullivan, M., Khandani, A. K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-01-2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Arbitrary waveform generation; Complexity; dispersion; gradient-descent; L-BFGS; Light modulation; Mach-Zehnder interferometers; Modulation; Optical interferometry; Optical modulation; Optical polarization; Optical transmitters; Phase modulation; phase modulators; quasi-newton; spectral broadening; spectro-temporal unitary modulators; Symbols
• ISSN: 0733-8724; 1558-2213
• DOI: 10.1109/JLT.2023.3309973

We report a reduced complexity single polarization all-pass modulation scheme that uses overlap and discard to implement continuous transmission. We find that transmitter NSRs of -25 dB and -21dB can be achieved with 1/3 and 1/6 the complexity, respectively, of reported solutions. We compare this modulation scheme with a conventional Mach-Zehnder modulator solution by measures of throughput, spectral efficiency, DSP and hardware complexity as well as back-to-back modem margin.