Demonstration of 625 Gbaud advanced modulation formats with subcarrier multiplexed technique on silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator

Silicon Mach-Zehnder modulators (Si MZMs) with good linearity are designed and fabricated. 6.25 Gbaud Nyquist 16, 32 and 64-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) optical signals were successfully generated by intensity modulation from the Si MZM, and the effective data rates are 22.61 Gb/s, 28.26 Gb/s and 33.91 Gb/s respectively. The subcarrier multiplexed technique and direct detection scheme were employed in this experiment. After 53.1 km transmission, the BERs of 16-QAM and 32-QAM are both below the 7% hard-decision forward error correction limit, while the back-to-back BER of 64-QAM is well below the 20% soft-decision forward error correction limit. These results demonstrated that the Si MZM can be used in the high-capacity low-cost short-haul intensity modulation and direct detection system.