PAM-4 Generation Using an Electrostatic Doping Aided Single Silicon Microring Modulator Driven By Two Binary Electrical Signals

Abstract In this paper, we propose and analyze the performance of an on-chip electrostatic doping (ED) aided single silicon microring PAM-4 modulator driven by two binary electrical signals of different peak-to-peak voltages. The proposed ED-aided microring modulator (MRM) is realizable on the standard 220 nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform and can operate over the C-band. The steady state and dynamic performance of the ED-aided MRM is estimated using commercial simulation tools. Also, we have analytically assessed the performance of the proposed PAM-4 modulator in terms of optical modulation amplitude (OMA), transmitter power penalty (TPP), level-deviation (LD), and dynamic energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed system can achieve pre-HD FEC bit error rate (BER) of 3.8 × 10−3 at 50 Gb/s over 1 km of standard single mode fiber (SSMF) that is promising for next generation high-speed silicon optic link. Simulation results also indicate that the proposed ED-aided MRM based PAM-4 modulator while operating at 50 Gb/s offers approximately 17.63 dB of extinction ratio (ER) with 2.2 dB of insertion loss (IL) and -2.7 dBm of OMA (for 0 dBm of input optical power). The 3-dB electro-optic bandwidth of such modulator is assessed to be 19.58 GHz. Estimated dynamic energy consumption per bit for 25 Gb/s OOK signal and 50 Gb/s PAM-4 signals are 110.63 fJ and 40.18 fJ, respectively.