Chirp Management in Silicon-Graphene Electro Absorption Modulators

We study the frequency chirp properties of Graphene-on- Silicon electro-absorption modulators (EAMs). By experimentally measuring the chirp of a 100 um long single layer Graphene EAM, we show that the optoelectronic properties of Graphene induce a large positive linear chirp (up to 1.8 GHz) on the optical signal generated by the modulator. We exploit this peculiar feature for chromatic-dispersion compensation in fiber optic transmission thanks to the pulse temporal lensing effect. In particular, we show dispersion compensation in a 10Gb/s transmission experiment on standard single mode fiber with temporal focusing distance (0-dB optical-signal-to-noise ratio penalty) of 60 km, and also demonstrate 100 km transmission with a bit error rate largely lower than the conventional Reed-Solomon forward error correction threshold of 10-3.