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

Abstract In 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.