Net 350 Gbps/λ IMDD Transmission Enabled by High Bandwidth Thin-Film Lithium Niobate MZM

We demonstrate ultra-high-speed data transmission at a symbol rate up to 144 Gbaud using thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) modulator in an intensity modulation direct-detection (IMDD) system. With 95 GHz 6-dB electro-optic bandwidth and 1.5 V half-wave voltage, this C-band modulator enables the transmission of net 318 (308) Gbps PAM-6 at B2B (after 500 m of standard single-mode fiber) below the 6.7% overhead (OH) hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) BER threshold of
$3.8\times 10 ^{-3}$
. We also transmit net 360 (350) Gbps PAM-8 at B2B (500 m), which satisfies the normalized generalized mutual information (NGMI) threshold of 0.8798 with 19.02% overhead soft-decision (SD) FEC. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of net 300 Gbps below the 6.7% OH HD-FEC BER threshold and the highest net rate (360 Gbps) achieved on the TFLN platform using pulse amplitude modulation (PAM).