Patent 11397363 was granted and assigned to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone on July, 2022 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A control processor performs, in a startup sequence of an IQ optical modulator using a nested MZI, a first-stage process of controlling, so that a signal quality of an optical QAM signal output from a monitor port of the IQ optical modulator approaches a target quality, a voltage applied by a Bias_I voltage generator to I-component MZ optical modulator, a voltage applied by a Bias_Q voltage generator to a Q-component MZ optical modulator, and a voltage applied by a Bias_Ph voltage generator to a Bias_Ph phase adjusting means for controlling an optical path length of a parent MZI. After a completion of the first-stage process, the control processor changes a voltage output from the Bias_Ph voltage generator by a predetermined amount.