There has been extensive research on the fabrication of monolithic silicon-based coherent receivers at 1550 nm [
57–
64], with recent works demonstrating a transmission at 64 GBd using a device fabricated in the same technology as used in this work [
64]. Since technology specifications, design parameters and equipment can vary, a direct comparison of O- and C-band performance for a receiver is quite difficult. For this purpose, we have fabricated two coherent receivers with the same electrical topology [
65], optimized for either O-band [
8] or C-band. The optical loss contributions of both the O- and C-band receivers are compared in Table 2. The insertion loss for the GRCs and waveguide routing are determined using process control structures. The MMIs for both O- and C-band have been simulated, and for the O-band the MMI in Section 2.3 has been used. Due to the phase relation of 4 × 4 MMIs, waveguide crossings have to be used and their performance is also simulated. Each loss contribution is listed in Table 2 together with the respective values in a 40 nm bandwidth. The expected loss for the optical circuit at 1310 nm accumulates to approximately 5 dB and deviates less than 0.2 dB compared to that of the C-band device, which is negligibly small. That difference remains below 0.5 dB over a 40 nm bandwidth. To compare the performance of both receivers, an intradyne back-to-back transmission has been performed. A detailed description of the deployed setup in Fig. 5(a) can be found in Ref. [
8]. It is noteworthy that the IQ modulator is a dedicated C-band device and is used to evaluate both receivers, as commercial O-band modulators are as yet not readily available. The praseodymium-doped fiber amplifier (PDFA) is used during the O-band measurement to allow for similar power levels at the receiver input for the O- and C-band measurement. The O-band laser is amplified to+16 dBm, which is within the available fiber coupled optical power for reported devices at that wavelength [
66]. To compare the two coherent receivers, bit error rate (BER) measurements are performed at varied optical signal to noise ratios (OSNRs) using either a PDFA or erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) for noise loading. Figure 5(b) shows the BER over the OSNR (in 0.1 nm in the C-band, and 71.6 pm in the O-band) for a 56 GBd QPSK using either the O-band or C-band receiver in a back-to-back scenario. For the O-band receiver, 48 GBd QPSK is also shown for reference. While amplifier-free links are not limited by the OSNR, but rather the received optical power, OSNR measurements are the typical method by which coherent receivers are evaluated and compared. Also shown in Fig. 5(b) is the received optical power for the modulated signal for O- and C-band, respectively. The performance is, as expected, quite similar, with a slightly decreasing performance in the O-band for increasing OSNRs. Since the electrical topology and expected bandwidth is identical for both receivers, this can be reasonably assumed to be largely attributed to the added imbalance and phase error of the C-band modulator during the O-band measurement. It should be noted, that the remaining singular bit errors at high OSNRs (e.g., 30 dB) are potentially setup-related. Consecutive blocks have been recorded and processed until enough received bits become available to support the statistical analysis. The relatively long measurement time per error rate (up to
30 min for high OSNRs), and the unavoidable instability of the coupling in that time affects the BER measurement, and may cause individual errors. The O-band signal has also been pre-amplified, which further degrades the performance slightly (PDFA noise figure<7 dB). Using the O-band receiver, a transmission experiment through standard SMF (average loss in the O-band 0.46 dB/km) has also been performed. The optical received power is varied using a variable optical attenuator (VOA). No compensation for CD is added to the DSP. The minimal received optical power is
−20 dBm. The results in Fig. 5(c) show power margins of 7, 5.3, and 3.8 dB for the investigated link distances of 4, 8.5, and 13 km, respectively.