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

• Published in: Optics express Vol. 28; no. 17; pp. 24693 - 24707
• Main Authors: Kieninger, Clemens, Füllner, Christoph, Zwickel, Heiner, Kutuvantavida, Yasar, Kemal, Juned N., Eschenbaum, Carsten, Elder, Delwin L., Dalton, Larry R., Freude, Wolfgang, Randel, Sebastian, Koos, Christian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 17-08-2020
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/OE.390315

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 aU π L = 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.