Emulation of integrated high-bandwidth photonic AWG using low-speed electronics

We present a theoretical validation of a photonic arbitrary waveform generation concept suited for overcoming the bandwidth limitations of a modulator and its driving signal to generate high-speed signals. Along with a complete mathematical proof for the concept of Nyquist pulse sequences and time-domain interleaving based AWG, a proof-of-concept experiment with an integrated silicon modulator on the BiCMOS platform is demonstrated. With an employed electro-optic bandwidth of 10 GHz, a sampling rate of 30 GS/s is achieved and bandwidth limited arbitrary waveforms are generated.