Silicon photonics integrated 16-QAM modulator exploiting only binary driving electronics

Abstract

A silicon photonics integrated reconfigurable nested Mach-Zehnder interferometer including tunable splitters and four independent phase modulators has been designed and fabricated. Thanks to the custom architecture, 16-QAM modulation is achieved with simple binary driving signals and successfully detected up to 20Gbaud with BER below the FEC level.