Broadband Modulation Performance of 100-GHz EO Polymer MZMs

We experimentally characterize the performance of 100-GHz electro-optical polymer Mach-Zehnder modulators in both dual-drive and single-drive versions using broadband modulation. For the dual-drive version, we measure bit-error rate (BER) at 80 Gbit/s for differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) and > 90 Gbit/s for on-off keying (OOK). The eye diagrams of 100 Gbit/s OOK and S21 measurement of up to 110-GHz further indicate a response bandwidth of > 100 GHz. Tunable-chirp operation is also demonstrated by changing the phase and amplitude of each driving signal. For the single-drive version, a BER of 10-9 is achieved for both 100-Gbit/s OOK and DPSK signals without optical or electrical equalization. The single-drive version shows a 7-dB bandwidth of > 110-GHz and a chirp factor of as low as -0.02.