Enabling Complex Modulation of Directly Modulated Signals Using Laser Frequency Chirp

Abstract

Directly modulated laser (DML) with direct detection (DD) dominates the commercial optical short reach applications. When upgrading the DML-DD to higher data rate, the frequency chirp is commonly regarded as a performance barrier. On the contrary, in this letter, we take advantage of the chirp to generate phase modulation along with the intensity, namely, realize complex modulation at transmitter using a single DML. Coherent detection (CD) is applied to recover this 2 dimensional (2-D) signal. A modified Viterbi algorithm (VA) conducts maximum likelihood decoding utilizing the signal intensity and differential phase in receiver digital signal processing (DSP). By making decision using 2-D in..