Net 67 Gbps Transmission Over 2 km at Sub 1 Vpp Using Packaged Silicon Photonic MZM

In this work, IBM, CMC, AMF, and McGill University work together to verify a simplified packaging scheme for Si-photonic devices based on incorporating IBM’s polymer photonic interface into AMF’s Si-photonic fabrication process flow. The proposed procedure is used in packaging an O-band Si-photonic traveling wave Mach-Zehnder modulator (TW-MZM) yielding a fiber-to-fiber insertion loss of 16.5 dB and 16 GHz 3-dB bandwidth. Employing the packaged module without RF or optical amplification, we demonstrate the transmission of 28 Gbaud PAM4 (net 53 Gbps) over 2 km of SSMF using a linear feed-forward equalizer below the $2.4\,\,\times \,\,10^{-4}$ KP4-FEC BER threshold with 750 mVpp, and under the $3.8\,\,\times \,\,10^{-3}$ HD-FEC threshold at 500 mVpp. Besides, we transmit 36 Gbaud (net 67 Gbps) under HD-FEC at 830 mVpp. Operating with an RF driver; we transmit 70 Gbaud PAM4 below HD-FEC, which corresponds to a net rate of 131 Gbps. The achieved transmission performance highlights the potential of the proposed packaging scheme.