Optical interferometric synthesis of PAM4 signals based on dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulation

摘要

this work, optical interferometric synthesis and demodulation of four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) signals by using commercial dual-drive Mach-Zehnder Modulator (DD-MZM) is proposed and studied. Simulations are carried out and signal quality is evaluated in terms of eye jitter, linearity and so on for the PAM4 signals generated by the proposed DD-MZM with improved performance unfolded. Experimental generation of the optically synthesized PAM4 signals up to 50 Gbaud (100 Gbps) is achieved. The transmission of the PAM4 signals over 5-Km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) is carried out with error-free below the FEC limit (3.8E-3) without digital equalization at 90 Gbps. The linear-amplifier-free configuration by DD-MZM leads to simplified implementation and improved performance for high speed PAM4 signal generation, which would be of great significance for short reach optical interconnection. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.