High Baud Rate Transmission With Silicon Photonic Modulators

We review high baud rate operation of silicon photonic modulators with emphasis on short-reach and metro-haul applications. The current status of both devices and digital signal processing are discussed. The basic design of a typical carrier-depletion-based dual-drive traveling-wave Mach-Zehnder modulator (TW-MZM) is studied by simulation. Based on an all-silicon TW-MZM, we report the transmission experiments of high baud rate single sideband 4-ary pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) signals with linear equalization and artificial neural network based equalization, respectively. Our work indicates all-silicon modulators can address the requirements of future optical communication systems operating at 100 Gbaud.