Automatic Bias Control of a Silicon Photonics Dual Parallel Mach-Zehnder Optical Modulator

In recent years, silicon photonics (SiPh) has generated considerable research interest and achieved rapid progress in coherent optical transceivers market. Automatic bias control (ABC) is an important technology of dual parallel Mach-Zehnder (MZ) optical modulators. Most researches have been investigated based on LiNO3 modulator, but few on SiPh, in which many ABC algorithms become invalid due to the non-idealities. In this paper, a novel and effective ABC scheme for SiPh in-phase and quadrature (IQ) modulator is proposed, and investigated theoretically and experimentally. Compared to the convention method of LiNO3, our algorithm is still robust in SiPh modulator with finite extinction ratios.