Experimental comparison of direct detection Nyquist SSB transmission based on silicon dual-drive and IQ Mach-Zehnder modulators with electrical packaging

We have designed and fabricated a silicon photonic in-phase-quadrature (IQ) modulator based on a nested dual-drive Mach-Zehnder structure incorporating electrical packaging. We have assessed its use for generating Nyquist-shaped single sideband (SSB) signals by operating it either as an IQ Mach-Zehnder modulator (IQ-MZM) or using just a single branch of the dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DD-MZM). The impact of electrical packaging on the modulator bandwidth is also analyzed. We demonstrate 40 Gb/s (10Gbaud) 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) Nyquist-shaped SSB transmission over 160 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF). Without using any chromatic dispersion compensation, the bit error rates (BERs) of 5.4 × 10-4 and 9.0 × 10-5 were measured for the DD-MZM and IQ-MZM, respectively, far below the 7% hard-decision forward error correction threshold. The performance difference between IQ-MZM and DD-MZM is most likely due to the non-ideal electrical packaging. Our work is the first experimental comparison between silicon IQ-MZM and silicon DD-MZM in generating SSB signals. We also demonstrate 50 Gb/s (12.5Gbaud) 16-QAM Nyquist-shaped SSB transmission over 320 km SSMF with a BER of 2.7 × 10-3. Both the silicon IQ-MZM and the DD-MZM show potential for optical transmission at metro scale and for data center interconnection.