25 Gb/s Colorless Transmitter Based on Reflective Electroabsorption Modulator for Ultra-Dense WDM-PON Application

We present a colorless transmitter based on a reflective electroabsorption modulator (EAM) monolithically integrated with a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). A semi-insulating buried heterostructure (SI-BH) technology is used to define the device waveguide structures. The integration of the SOA allows to fully compensate for insertion losses. We observe up to +2 dB net gain in the fiber-coupled output power, for 90 mA SOA bias current. We demonstrate 25 Gb/s operation with non-return-to-zero (NRZ) modulation format, with a dynamic extinction ratio (DER) up to 14 dB for 2.6 V peak-to-peak EAM driving voltage. Colorless operation is demonstrated over 15 nm spectral range in the C-band. We achieved 10 km dispersion limited transmission distance at 25 Gb/s NRZ with a penalty of 3 dB at 10−3 bit error rate (BER).