On the use of 2.5-Gb/s Mach-Zehnder modulators to generate 10-Gb/s optical duobinary signals

We demonstrate the generation of 10-Gb/s optical duobinary signals from 2.5-Gb/s Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulators without using duobinary encoders. The absence of the duobinary encoder not only permits the monolithic integration of electrical components but also reduces the required bandwidth of MZ modulators as low as 3 GHz. However, it might induce pattern-length dependency to the signals. Our demonstration, performed with four 2.5-Gb/s MZ modulators obtained from two different vendors, shows that the receiver sensitivity of better than -33.8 dBm is achieved at a pseudorandom bit sequence length of 2³¹-1 when dispersion of 1200 ∼ 1700 ps/nm is applied to the signals. This is 1.6 dB poorer than using an 8.5-GHz bandwidth MZ modulator along with a 3.0-GHz Bessel filter. Therefore, this scheme can be used to implement cost-effective 10-Gb/s optical duobinary transmitters without significant performance degradation.