An Experimental Demonstration of 160-Gbit/s PAM-4 Using a Silicon Micro-Ring Modulator

Silicon photonics has been regarded as a promising technology for future small-footprint, low-cost and low-power 400-Gbit/s datacenter interconnects (DCIs). In this work, for the first time, we report an experimental demonstration of a single-wavelength, single-polarization 160-Gbit/s four-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) employing a single integrated silicon carrier-depletion micro-ring modulator (MRM). The measured bit-error rates (BERs) for the back-to-back (BTB) and after 1-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission are 1.36E-3 and 2.12E-3, respectively, all below the hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) coding limit with 7% overhead. A data rate of up to 170 Gbit/s with a BER lower than the HD-FEC limit is demonstrated for the BTB transmission.