Client-side optics are facing an ever-increasing upgrading pace, driven by upcoming 5G related services and datacenter applications. The demand for a single lane data rate is soon approaching 200 Gbps. To meet such high-speed requirements, all segments of traditional intensity modulation direct detection (IM/DD) technologies are being challenged. The characteristics of electrical and optoelectronic components, and the performance of modulation, coding and digital signal processing (DSP) techniques are being stretched to their limits. In this context, we witnessed technological breakthroughs in several aspects, including development of broadband devices, novel modulation formats and coding, and high-performance DSP algorithms for the past few years. A great momentum has been accumulated to overcome the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we focus on IM/DD transmissions, and provide an overview of recent research and development efforts on key enabling technologies for 200 Gbps per lane and beyond. Our recent demonstrations of 200 Gbps short-reach transmissions with 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and discrete multitone signals are also presented as examples to show the system requirements in terms of device characteristics and DSP performance. Apart from digital coherent technologies and advanced direct detection systems, such as Stokes-vector and Kramers-Kronig schemes, we expect high-speed IM/DD systems will remain advantageous in terms of system cost, power consumption and footprint for short reach applications in the short- to mid- term perspective.

We report on an on-off keying intensity-modulation and direct-detection C-band optical transceiver capable of addressing all datacenter interconnect environments at well-beyond 100Gbaud. For this, the transmitter makes use of two key InP technologies: a 2:1 double heterojunction bipolar transistor selector multiplexer and a monolithically integrated distributed-feedback laser traveling-wave electro-absorption modulator, both exceeding 100-GHz of 3-dB analog bandwidth. A pre-amplified 110-GHz PIN photodiode prior to a 100-GHz analog-to-digital converter complete the ultra-high bandwidth transceiver module; the device under study. In the experimental work, which discriminates between intra- and inter-data center scenarios (dispersion unmanaged 120, 560, 960m; and dispersion-managed 10, and 80km of standard singlemode fiber), we evaluate the bit-error rate evolution against the received optical power at 140, 180, and 204Gbaud on-off keying for different equalization configurations (adaptive linear filter with and without the help of short-memory sequence estimation) and forward error correction schemes (hard-decision codes with 7% and 20% overhead); drawing conclusions from the observed system-level limitations of the respective environments at this ultra-high baudrate, as well as from the operation margins and sensitivity metrics. From the demonstration, we highlight three results: successful operation with >6-dB sensitivity margin below the 7% error-correction at 140Gbaud over the entire 100m-80km range with only linear feed-forward equalization. Then the transmission of a 180Gbaud on-off-keying carrier over 80km considering 20% error-correction overhead. And finally, 10-km communication at 204Gbaud on-off keying with up to 6dB sensitivity margin, and regular 7%-overhead error-correction.

We demonstrate 50-Gb/s DMT signal transmission over 20-km SMF by using a 10G-class 1.55-μm DML without optical dispersion compensation. Injection locking technique is introduced, which doubles system bandwidth and greatly suppresses DML chirp. © 2019 The Author(s)

All parts of an IM/DD system are being stretched to the limit as the single lane data rate approaches 200 Gbps and beyond. We report the recent developments on the key enablers conquering this target.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) together with one-time pad cryptography provides unconditional security for the sensitive information. However, the lack of telecom compatibility hinders massive deployment of QKD. In this talk we will discuss the approaches of embedding QKD in optical communication systems and the recent progress.

Silicon photonics is a promising solution for next generation of short-range optical communication systems. Silicon modulators have driven an important research activity over the past years, and many transmission links using on-off keying modulation format (OOK) were successfully demonstrated with a large diversity of modulator structures. In order to keep up with the demand of increasing bitrates for limited bandwidths in Datacom applications, higher modulation formats are explored, such as quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) or 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4). However, driving the modulators to generate PAM-4 signals commonly require expensive and power-hungry electronic devices such as digital-to-analog converters (DACs) for pulse-shaping and digital signal processors (DSP) for nonlinearity compensation. Lastly, new solutions were studied to overcome this issue, including new driving methods based on the use of two different input binary sequences applied directly on the modulator. While most of the reported works are focused on the C-band of communication, the O-band can present a definitive advantage due to the low dispersion of standard single-mode (SSMF) fiber. For those reasons, we demonstrate the generation of a 10-Gbaud DAC-less PAM-4 signal in the O-band using a depletion-based silicon traveling wave Mach-Zehnder modulator (TWMZM). An open eye diagram was obtained, and a bit error rate (BER) of 3.8×10 -3 was measured for a received optical power of about-6 dBm.

This paper reports the demonstration of high-speed PAM-4 transmission using a 1.5-μm single-mode vertical cavity surface emitting laser (SM-VCSEL) over multicore fiber with 7 cores over different distances. We have successfully generated up to 70 Gbaud 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) signals with a VCSEL in optical back-to-back, and transmitted 50 Gbaud PAM-4 signals over both 1-km dispersion-uncompensated and 10-km dispersion-compensated in each core, enabling a total data throughput of 700 Gbps over the 7-core fiber. Moreover, 56 Gbaud PAM-4 over 1-km has also been shown, whereby unfortunately not all cores provide the required 3.8 × 10<formula><tex>$^-3$</tex></formula>bit error rate (BER) for the 7% overhead-hard decision forward error correction (7% OH HDFEC). The limited bandwidth of the VCSEL and the adverse chromatic dispersion of the fiber are suppressed with pre-equalization based on accurate end-to-end channel characterizations. With a digital post-equalization, BER performance below the 7% OH-HDFEC limit is achieved over all cores. The demonstrated results show a great potential to realize high-capacity and compact short-reach optical interconnects for data centers.

A monolithically integrated dual-DFB laser generates a 408 GHz carrier used for demonstrating a record-high single-channel bit rate of 131 Gbit/s transmitted over 10.7 m. 16-QAM-OFDM modulation and specific nonlinear equalization techniques are employed

Nonlinear impairments induced by the opto-electronic components are one of the fundamental performance-limiting factors in high-speed optical short-reach communications, significantly hindering capacity improvement. This paper proposes to employ a kernel mapping function to map the signals in a Hilbert space to its inner product in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, which has been successfully demonstrated to mitigate nonlinear impairments in optical short-reach communication systems. The operation principle is derived. An intensity modulation/direct detection system with 1.5-µm vertical cavity surface emitting laser and 10-km 7-core fiber achieving 540.68-Gbps (net-rate 505.31-Gbps) has been carried out. The experimental results reveal that the kernel mapping based schemes are able to realize comparable transmission performance as the Volterra filtering scheme even with a high order.

With the approach of the 5G era, stringent requirements are imposed on the data transport solutions, including both of the supported transmission reach and the capacity. Radio-over-fiber technologies are considered to be promising candidates to cope with both aspects, owing to the low-loss and broad-bandwidth nature of the optical fibers. Meanwhile with such optical transport solutions, signals can be collected from the distributed remote radio sites and processed in a centralized manner. In this report, we target on the digital radio-over-fiber systems, and discuss about several key technologies, focusing on the aspects of coding and transmission, which could potentially enable terabit-scale data transport.