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Complementing plasmonic slot waveguides with highly nonlinear organic materials has rendered a new generation of ultracompact active nanophotonic components that are redefining the state of the art. In this paper, we review the fundamentals of this so-called plasmonic–organic–hybrid (POH) platform. Starting from simple phase shifters to the most compact $IQ$ modulators, we introduce key devices of high-speed data communications. For instance, all-plasmonic Mach–Zehnder modulators (MZMs) are reviewed and long-term prospects are discussed. This kind of modulator already features unique properties such as a small footprint ( <$ 20 \mu$m ), a large electro–optic bandwidth ( >$ 110 GHz), a small energy consumption ( \sim$25 fJ/b), a large extinction ratio ( >$ 25 dB) in combination with a record small voltage-length product of 40 V \mu$ m. Finally, as an example for seamless integration we introduce novel plasmonic . This demonstration ultimately shows how plasmonics can be used to control both phase and amplitude of an optical carrier on the microscale with reasonably low losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software-defined transceivers offer flexibility, increased resilience to channel impairments, and an upgrade path for the future transmission systems. Such transceivers have been discussed in the literature for several years and are now about to be established in long-haul optical communications. In access networks, however, the circumstances are different. Here, a great variety of transceiver and network architectures has been developed. The hardware implementations impose various limitations on the benefits that are usually associated with software-defined transceivers. So the question is: Will software-defined transceivers be of equal importance in dynamic access networks? And, as fundamental limitations mainly originate in the modulation and detection techniques, which hardware implementations would be most promising for software-defined transceivers? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A comb generator based on feeding a single dual drive Mach–Zehnder modulator with a sinusoidal radio frequency (RF) at one arm and its double frequency at the other arm is demonstrated. Our comb generator benefits from the superposition of optical subcarriers generated by the fundamental and its second harmonic. We demonstrate flexibility in center wavelength tunability, subcarrier spacing, and subcarrier count. For a fundamental frequency at, e.g., 6.25 GHz, our comb generator can produce 9, 5, 4, or 3 optical subcarriers with a spectral flatness of <1.2~dB. We successfully demonstrate to the best of our knowledge, the generation of the largest number of comblines requiring the lowest drive signal with the least components within the field of RF-generated combs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We demonstrate single-laser 32.5 Tbit/s 16QAM Nyquist wavelength division multiplexing transmission over a total length of 227 km of SMF-28 without optical dispersion compensation. A number of 325 optical carriers is derived from a single laser and encoded with dual-polarization 16QAM data using sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses. As we use no guard bands, the carriers have a spacing of 12.5 GHz equal to the symbol rate or Nyquist bandwidth of the data. We achieve a net spectral efficiency of 6.4 bit/s/Hz using a software-defined transmitter, which generates the electric drive signals for the electro-optic modulator in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]