100 GBd IM/DD transmission over 14 km SMF in the C-band enabled by a plasmonic SSB MZM

100 Gb/s NRZ-OOK transmission over 14 km standard single mode fiber in the C-band is demonstrated with a simple intensity modulation and direct detection scheme. The transmission concept utilizes single sideband modulation and comprises a single differential digital-to-analog converter with adjustable phase offset, a new dual electrode plasmonic Mach-Zehnder modulator, a laser at 1537.5 nm, standard single mode fibers, a photodiode, an analog-to-digital converter, and linear offline digital signal processing. The presented SSB concept requires no DSP and complex signaling at the transmitter. The demonstrated SSB transmitter increased the possible transmission distance by a factor of 4.6 compared to a DSB transmitter. We also investigated the equalization requirements. A T/2-spaced feedforward equalizer requires 27 taps to achieve transmission over 10 km with a BER below the HD-FEC limit. In comparison to a DSB transmitter, the SSB transmitter reduced the receiver DSP complexity by a factor of 13.7.