Abstract:A novel transmitter to generate a dark RZ signal with tunable duty cycle and extinction ratio is proposed, by modifying the process of precoding, modulating and coding. A dark RZ signal is generated simply by using one dual-arm Mach-Zehnder LiNbO3 modulator. We demonstrate experimentally that this optical dark RZ signal can be directly measured by a conventional binary intensity modulation direct detection (IM-DD) receiver. When different values of duty cycles at 2.5 Gbit/s are adjusted, the experimental results show different BER curves and eye diagrams of the optical dark RZ signal.