Single-carrier 72 GBaud 32QAM and 84 GBaud 16QAM transmission using a SiP IQ modulator with joint digital-optical pre-compensation.

We establish experimentally the suitability of an all-silicon optical modulator to support future ultra-high-capacity coherent optical transmission links beyond 400 Gb/s. We present single-carrier data transmission from 400 Gb/s to 600 Gb/s using an all-silicon IQ modulator produced with a generic foundry process. The operating point of the silicon photonic transmitter is carefully optimized to find the best efficiency bandwidth trade-off.