GeSi EAM-Based 160 Gb/s Nyquist Half-Cycle Subcarrier Modulation Transmission

We demonstrate the transmission of beyond-100 Gb/s Nyquist half-cycle 16-quadrature-amplitude modulation (16-QAM) subcarrier modulation (SCM) signals with a compact silicon-based GeSi electro-absorption modulator. In combination with nonlinear compensation, the measured bit-error rate (BER) after 2 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission is below the 20% hard-decision forward error-correction (HD-FEC) threshold of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.5\times 10^{\mathbf {-2}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for single-lane 160 Gb/s operation. The presented modulator shows great potential for high-capacity and low-power-consumption silicon-photonic transceivers for data-center interconnects.