Performance evaluation of photonic UWB generation based on silicon MZM.

Silicon photonics has emerged as the premier candidate for the photonic systems-on-chip (SoC). The scheme based on the silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) to generate photonic ultra-wideband (UWB) signals is helpful to the integration of the UWB system with other optical networks on a single silicon-based chip. In this paper, according to the influence of the nonlinear free carrier dispersion (FCD) effect and the free carrier absorption (FCA) effect, the performance of two typical UWB generation schemes is numerically analyzed. The double side-band UWB (DSB-UWB) generation scheme needs the DC reverse bias which increases the complexity of the modulator and there is a residual chirp resulting from the FCD effect even the push-pull operation is adopted. The quasi single-sideband UWB (QSSB-UWB) generation scheme doesn't have these problems. However there is the asymmetric amplitude peak in the generated UWB signal. The property of the large singal modulation is also investigated to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).