We propose a 40-Gb/s star 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) transmitter using a single dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DDMZM). This transmitter is demonstrated through experiment and simulation and shows the advantage of simplicity for implementation. Simulation results indicate that error free performance could be achieved for the generated signal after 80-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission with coherent detection scheme.