QPSK modulation in the O-band using a single dual-drive Mach-Zehnder silicon modulator

Abstract

Keeping up with bandwidth requirements in next generation short- and long-reach optical communication systems will require migrating from simple modulation formats such as on-off keying (OOK) to more advanced formats such as quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK). In this work, we report the first demonstration of QPSK signal generation in the O-Band using a silicon dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DD-MZM). The performance of the silicon DD-MZM is assessed at 20 Gb/s and compared against a similar DD-MZM based on LiNbO3, showing a limited implementation power penalty of only 1.5 dB.