High linearity silicon DC Kerr modulator enhanced by slow light for 112 Gbit/s PAM4 over 2 km single mode fiber transmission

We demonstrate a high efficiency, high linearity and high-speed silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator based on the DC Kerr effect enhanced by slow light. The two modulation arms based on 500-µm-long grating waveguides are embedded with PN and PIN junctions, respectively. A comprehensive comparison between the two modulation arms reveals that insertion loss, bandwidth and modulation linearity are improved significantly after employing the DC Kerr effect. The complementary advantages of the slow light and the DC Kerr effect enable a modulation efficiency of 0.85 V·cm, a linearity of 115 dB·Hz2/3, and a bandwidth of 30 GHz when the group index of slow light is set to 10. Furthermore, 112 Gbit/s PAM4 transmission over 2 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) with bit error ratio (BER) below the soft decision forward error correction (SD-FEC) threshold is also demonstrated.