Silicon-Organic Hybrid MZI Modulator Generating OOK, BPSK and 8-ASK Signals for Up to 84 Gbit/s

We report on high-speed multilevel signal generation and arbitrary pulse shaping with silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) modulators. Pure phase modulation exploiting the linear electrooptic effect allows the generation of multiple modulations formats at highest speed such as 40-Gbit/s on-off-keying (OOK) and binary-phase-shift keying (BPSK) and 28-Gbd 4-ASK and 8-ASK with data rates up to 84 Gbit/s. Additionally, beside NRZ pulse shaping, for the first time, Nyquist pulse shaping with silicon modulators is demonstrated to enable multiplexing at highest spectral efficiency.