Robust phase-shift-keying silicon photonic modulator.

Here we propose a robust silicon modulator that seamlessly generates phase shift keyed data. The modulator has very low insertion loss and is robust against electrical amplitude variations in the modulating signal; specifically a 50%-200% variation in modulating amplitude leads to only a π/9 variation in output optical phase, corresponding to only ± 10% variation in the differentially detected signal. This yields a ~2.5dB enhancement in SNR over OOK (on-off-keying) formats.