Analysis of the Colorless Operation of a Calibrated 120° Coherent Receiver

The performance of an integrated InP 120° coherent receiver has been experimentally analyzed using 50 Gbps 16-QAM signals. IQ components are obtained through a set of coefficients applied to the three output photocurrents of the device. It is demonstrated that the calibration of these coefficients can compensate, without extra computational cost, fabrication hardware impairments and allows a wide optical bandwidth (up to 80 nm range) with a high interfering rejection capability. It has been experimentally verified colorless operation in the complete C-band for a received interfering power close to 11 dB above the signal level. This confirms a remarkable colorless behavior of our proposal.