Oclaro enters high-volume production of single-carrier 400G/lambda lithium niobate modulator

Oclaro Inc of San Jose, CA, USA (which provides components, modules and subsystems for optical communications) has announced volume production of its lithium niobate (LiNbO3) polarization-multiplexed quad Mach-Zehnder (PM-QMZ) modulators, which enable data rates up to 400G on a single wavelength, allowing users to quickly and cost effectively transition to faster network architectures for growing bandwidth demands.

“Oclaro has a proven history in delivering high-speed, high-volume lithium niobate external modulators that customers need to deploy high-bandwidth coherent networks up to 400G,” says Beck Mason, president of Oclaro’s Integrated Photonics business.

The single-carrier PM-QMZ lithium niobate external modulator is a high electro-optic bandwidth PM-QMZ device that integrates into a hermetic package an input beam splitter, four parallel Mach-Zehnder modulators configured for I-Q modulation, a polarization combiner, and monitor photodiodes for power and bias control. Key features of the modulator include: a 3dB electro-optic bandwidth exceeding 30GHz; an extinction ratio above 25dB (to enable complex modulation formats); insertion loss below 12dB for high efficiency; and support for L-band operation (similar to all other Oclaro LiNbO3modulators).