Silicon photonic modulators for net 300 Gbps/λ IM/DD and Net 1 Tbps/λ coherent transmission using All-Electronic equalization

•High-capacity IMDD transmission (net 300 Gbps/λ) using an O-band silicon photonic MZM using pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) for short-reach interconnects.•High-capacity coherent transmission (net 1 Tbps/λ) using a C-band silicon photonic inphase/quadrature (IQ) modulator with high order QAM formats over 80 km of SSMF for inter-datacenter interconnects.•Small-signal and large signal characterization of silicon photonic modulators.•Performance comparison with different modulation formats and digital signal processing enabling transmission of high data rate signals in IMDD and coherent communication. In this manuscript we describe the design and transmission system performance of two traveling wave Silicon Photonic (SiP) modulators: i) an O-band, single phase shifter based Mach-Zehnder Modulator (MZM); and ii) a C-band, two phase shifter based Inphase/Quadrature Modulator (IQM). For the O-band device, we demonstrate the transmission of 134 Gbaud PAM-4 (net 250 Gbps) at a BER below the 6.7 % overhead (OH) hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold of 3.8 × 10−3 over 2 km of standard single-mode fiber (SSMF), and we transmit 115 Gbaud PAM-8 (net 288 Gbps) and net 305 Gbps probabilistically shaped (PS)-PAM-8 assuming the 19.02 % overhead soft-decision (SD) FEC. For the C-band device and employing dual-polarization (DP) emulation, we transmit 105 Gbaud DP-64QAM over 80 km below the 25 % overhead SD- FEC BER threshold of 5 × 10−2; featuring the first demonstration of net 1 Tbps transmission using an all-silicon IQM.