Real-Time 100 Gb/s Transmission Using Three-Level Electrical Duobinary Modulation for Short-Reach Optical Interconnects

Electrical duobinary modulation is considered as a promising way to realize high capacity because of the low bandwidth requirement on the optical/electrical components and high tolerance toward chromatic dispersion. In this paper, we demonstrate a 100 Gb/s electrical duobinary transmission over 2 km standard single-mode fiber reaching a bit error rate under 7% HD-FEC threshold with the use of PRBS7. This link is tested in real-time without any form of digital signal processing. In-house developed SiGe BiCMOS transmitter and receiver ICs are used to drive an electroabsorption modulated laser and decode the received signal from a PIN-photodiode. The performance of 50 and 70 Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero and electrical duobinary transmission are investigated for comparison.