Duobinary Signals Zaineb Al-Qazwini, Student Member, IEEE, and Hoon Kim, Member, IEEE
Abstract—We report on the generation of 10-Gb/s nonre-
turn-to-zero signals using a directly modulated laser driven by 9B/10B line-coded, 3.5-GHz-bandwidth duobinary signals. The ternary frequency-modulated signals from the laser are converted into binary intensity-modulated signals by a delay interferometer (DI). Two schemes, one using the constructive port of the DI and the other using the destructive port, are demonstrated through experiment. Index Terms—Delay interferometer (DI), direct modulation, di- rectly modulated laser (DML), frequency modulation, line coding.
I. INTRODUCTION
D IRECTLY modulated lasers (DMLs) have gained much
Fig. 3. Performance of the destructive-port scheme. (a) Measured back-to-back
BER and (b) dispersion tolerance.
observed at a BER of with uncoded PRBS (not
shown in the figure). This is because of the nonuniform FM Fig. 2. Experimental setup for demonstration of the destructive-port scheme. response of the DML at low frequencies. With PRBS, The insets are the measured optical spectra at (a) DML output (DI frequency the signal has its lowest frequency component at 78.4 MHz response is plotted in red), (b) DI output (OBPF frequency response is plotted , which is well beyond the frequency dip (at in red), and (c) OBPF output, and the measured eye diagrams at (d) DML output, (e) DI output, and (f) OBPF output. 10 MHz) in the FM response of the DML, and consequently the signal utilizes the uniform region of the FM response. However, as the pattern length increases, the spectral spacing will have two different intensity levels, a low level which corre- becomes narrower, and hence the low-frequency contents of sponds to the component and a high level with the com- the signal will be adversely affected by the nonuniform FM re- ponent [Fig. 1(e)]. This split in the mark levels can be readily sponse. The 9B/10B coding depletes the low frequency contents suppressed by using the OBPF with its skirt located at which of the signal by 15 dB, and thus mitigates these pattern-length gives a low transmittance to the high-level marks, and conse- dependencies [6]. Using the 9B/10B-coded signals, we achieve quently equalizes the split in the mark levels [Fig. 1(f)]. a good receiver sensitivity of 17.6 dBm at a PRBS length of The experimental demonstration of the scheme is verified . The 0.9-dB penalty with respect to the uncoded using the setup shown in Fig. 2. NRZ signals with a pseudo- PRBS should be in part attributed to the line-rate increase [6]. random bit sequence (PRBS) length of were first en- The efficacy of mark-level equalization using OBPF is also coded off-line by a 9B/10B line coder and then precoded. Due evaluated using BER measurements. Without the OBPF, a poor to the overhead of the 9B/10B coding, the line rate is increased BER of is observed at a received power of 12 dBm. by 11%. The precoded signals were encoded into duobinary sig- We next measure the dispersion tolerance of the proposed nals using a 3.5-GHz LPF and then fed to a commercial DML scheme. Fig. 3(b) shows the receiver sensitivity as a function operating at 1549 nm. The LPF bandwidth falls within the typ- of the accumulated dispersion. The dispersion window, defined ical range of duobinary transmitters (i.e., 1/4 to 1/3 of the line as the allowable amount of dispersion inducing less than 2-dB rate). The DML was biased at 80 mA ( 8 times the threshold power penalty, is measured to be 300 ps/nm. This indicates current) to make the adiabatic chirp dominant over the tran- that the generated 10-Gb/s signals at 1550 nm can travel 20 km sient chirp, obtaining an output power of 6.5 dBm. The optimum over SSMF without dispersion compensation. driving voltage to the DML was found to be 2.0 , at which the peak-to-peak frequency deviation of the ternary FSK signals III. CONSTRUCTIVE-PORT SCHEME was estimated to be 8 GHz close to the line rate. The optical The DI has two output ports and both ports can convert the spectrum and eye diagram at the DML output are depicted in FSK signals from the DML into CPFSK/ASK signals. Fig. 4 Fig. 2(a) and (d), respectively. The DML output was sent to a DI shows the principle of operation when the constructive port of with a free-spectral range (FSR) of 10.7 GHz. Fig. 2(b) and (e) the DI is employed. Just like the case with the destructive-port show the optical spectrum and eye diagram at the DI output, scheme, the precoded NRZ signals first pass through the LPF respectively. A split in the mark levels caused by the inten- to be encoded into duobinary signals [Fig. 4(a) and (b)], which sity modulation of the DML is clearly observed in Fig. 2(e). are fed directly to the DML. The ternary FSK-modulated sig- However, the use of OBPF equalizes the mark levels as shown nals are then converted into CPFSK/ASK signals by passing in Fig. 2(f). The optical spectrum in Fig. 2(c) also shows the through the constructive port of the DI. The peak frequency of identical optical powers at and . The extinction ratio (ER) the DI is aligned to the component of the DML output sig- of the signals is measured to be 8 dB. The CPFSK/ASK sig- nals while the null frequencies of the DI to the and com- nals with 3-dBm optical power were launched into standard ponents, as shown in Fig. 4(c). Thus, the marks are composed of single-mode fiber (SSMF) and detected with a PIN receiver. the component whereas both the and components con- We first measure the back-to-back performance. Fig. 3(a) stitute the spaces [Fig. 4(d)]. Unlike the destructive-port scheme shows the bit-error ratio (BER) curve of the 9B/10B-coded in Section II, the OBPF, which was required to equalize the mark signals running at 11.06 Gb/s. Also plotted in Fig. 3(a) for com- levels, is not needed since the marks of the constructive-port parison are the BER curves measured with uncoded PRBSs of scheme are composed of a single frequency component. length and at 9.953 Gb/s. The receiver sensitivities The constructive-port scheme is also experimentally demon- BER of the and PRBSs are measured to strated using the same setup as in Fig. 2. In this case, however, be 18.5 and 11 dBm, respectively, whereas an error floor is we removed the OBPF and utilized the constructive port to 1308 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 22, NO. 17, SEPTEMBER 1, 2010
Fig. 6. Performance of the constructive-port scheme. (a) Measured back-to-
back BER and (b) dispersion tolerance.
to be ps/nm in Fig. 6(b), exhibiting asymmetry
around the zero dispersion in favor of positive dispersion. We as- Fig. 4. Principle of operation for the constructive-port scheme (a) NRZ data, cribe this to the asymmetric optical spectrum of the signals. Due (b) duobinary-encoded DML driving signal, (c) ternary FSK signals at the DML output (frequency profile), and (d) CPFSK/ASK signals at the DI output. to the narrower spectral width, the constructive-port scheme has wider dispersion window than the destructive-port scheme. Finally, we measure the sensitivity penalties incurred by the frequency offset between the DML and optical filters. It is found that the frequency offset should be kept within around 150 MHz for both schemes to have the penalty less than 2 dB. Since both the DML and DI are located at the transmitter side, the DML wavelength could be precisely aligned to the optical Fig. 5. Measured optical spectra using the constructive-port scheme at (a) DML output (DI frequency response is plotted in red) and (b) DI output. Optical eye filters by utilizing a frequency monitoring module [6]. diagrams at (c) DML output and (d) DI output. It is worth noting that in a wavelength-division-multiplexed system, the cost incurred by the DI and OBPF can be shared by multiple users via replacing the OBPF for each channel with launch the signals to SSMF. The optimum driving voltage to a single wavelength-offset wavelength-division multiplexer the DML was found to be 2.3 , at which the peak-to-peak (WDM). The periodicity of the DI also enables us to utilize frequency deviation of the FSK signals at the DML output a single DI at the output of the WDM. Thus, the increased was 9 GHz. Fig. 5(a) shows the optical spectrum of the cost per customer (caused by the OBPF and DI) becomes DML output signals together with the DI frequency response. insignificant as the number of users increases. As explained in the previous paragraph, the null frequencies of the DI are positioned to extinguish the edge frequency IV. CONCLUSION components of and . The optical spectrum and eye dia- We have proposed and demonstrated the generation of gram of the CPFSK/ASK signals at the DI output are shown 10-Gb/s NRZ signals using a DML driven by 9B/10B-coded, in Fig. 5(b) and (d), respectively. The ER of the signals is 3.5-GHz-bandwidth duobinary signals followed by a DI. The measured to be 11 dB. The signals are launched into the SSMF DI converts the ternary FSK signals from the DML into binary with an optical power of 1.7 dBm and detected with the PIN CPFSK/ASK signals. Two transmitter schemes, one using the receiver. It is worth noting that the absence of the OBPF helps constructive port of the DI and the other using the destructive to emit higher output power than the destructive-port scheme. port, exhibit good receiver sensitivity and dispersion tolerance Throughout the demonstration with the constructive-port large enough to be used for optical access networks. scheme, the line rate is fixed to 9.953 Gb/s regardless of whether the line coding is used. We believe this is because the FSR of REFERENCES the DI is not optimized for this scheme. In the destructive-port [1] X. Zhao et al., “Novel cascaded injection-locked 1.55-m VCSELs scheme, the DI suppresses the component only. Thus, even with 66 GHz modulation bandwidth,” Opt. Express, vol. 15, no. 22, pp. though deviates from the FSR of the DI, it induces 14810–14816, Oct. 2007. power loss only. In the constructive-port scheme, on the other [2] A. Tan and E. 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(Doi 10.1109/ISSCC.2013.6487622) Parikh, S. Kao, T. Hidaka, Y. Jian Jiang, Toda, A. Mcleod, - (IEEE 2013 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2013) - San Francisco, CA (2