Roll-Off Factor Analysis of Optical Nyquist Pulses Generated by an On-Chip Mach-Zehnder Modulator

Abstract

Optical sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses are promising in photonic signal processing and high-speed optical data transmission due to their orthogonality and inter-symbol interference (ISI) free characteristics. Nonetheless, the presence of non-idealities results in a deteriorated system performance, especially for the metrological assessment of sampling precision. In this work, we explore the impact of the optical filter roll-off factor on Nyquist pulses for a three-line comb with a frequency spacing of 8.4 GHz using a wideband on-chip silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator. Furthermore, we characterize the integrated modulator and compare the sinc-shaped Nyquist pulse quality with the recently reported works.