Mathieu Chagnon

Experimental study of 112 Gb/s short reach transmission employing PAM formats and SiP intensity modulator at 1.3 μm

We present a Silicon Photonic (SiP) intensity modulator operating at 1.3 μm with pulse amplitude modulation formats for short reach transmission employing a digital to analog converter for the RF signal generator, enabling pulse shaping and precompensation of the transmitters frequency response. Details of the SiP Mach-Zehnder interfometer are presented. We study the system performance at various bit rates, PAM orders and propagation distances. To the best of our knowledge, we report the first demonstration of a 112 Gb/s transmission over 10 km of SMF fiber operating below pre-FEC BER threshold of 3.8 × 10(-3) employing PAM-8 at 37.4 Gbaud using a fully packaged SiP modulator. An analytical model for the Q-factor metric applicable for multilevel PAM-N signaling is derived and accurately experimentally verified in the case of Gaussian noise limited detection. System performance is experimentally investigated and it is demonstrated that PAM order selection can be optimally chosen as a function of the desired throughput. We demonstrate the ability of the proposed transmitter to exhibit software-defined transmission for short reach applications by selecting PAM order, symbol rate and pulse shape.

Spectral Efficiency-Adaptive Optical Transmission Using Time Domain Hybrid QAM for Agile Optical Networks

We report the transmission of time domain hybrid QAM (TDHQ) signals for agile optical networks. A continuous tradeoff between spectral efficiency and achievable distance by mixing modulation formats including QPSK, 8QAM, and 16QAM is demonstrated in two scenarios: 1) 28 Gbaud non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signal for fixed 50 GHz grid systems; 2) superchannel transmission at date rates of up to 1.15 Tb/s and spectral efficiencies of up to 7.68 b/s/Hz. The TDHQ signal is generated using high-speed digital-to-analog converters (DACs) at the transmitter, and low-complexity digital signal processing (DSP) is proposed for processing the TDHQ signals at the receiver. Moreover, the nonlinearity tolerance of hybrid QAM signals with different configurations is investigated.

Experimental Parametric Study of a Silicon Photonic Modulator Enabled 112-Gb/s PAM Transmission System With a DAC and ADC

A packaged silicon photonic traveling wave Mach-Zehnder modulator operating at 1310 nm is presented and studied. The modulator is a series push-pull device and requires a bias applied to the common n-doped region. Effects of varying the bias voltage on the modulators Vπ bandwidth, and on chip-insertion loss are studied, and its impact on transmission performance are experimentally investigated for PAM-4 and PAM-8 formats at a throughput of 112 Gb/s, over varying distances of 0, 2, 10, and 20 km. Residual chromatic dispersion is shown to have no impact on performance up to 20 km. The PAM RF driving waveform is generated by an 8-bit digital-to-analog converter, while direct detection is done with a PIN+TIA followed by an 8-bit analog-to-digital converter. This IM/DD system utilizes digital signal processing with transmitter spectral compensation and receiver residual equalization. The performance impact for a varying number of transmitter precompensation taps and receiver equalization taps is studied, which has a direct impact on the transceivers power consumption. Using PAM-4, a BER below the FEC limit is obtained for either combinations of (transmitter, receiver) tap lengths: (19,19), (7,27), or (35,7), allowing flexibility in power consumption distribution.

Design, analysis, and transmission system performance of a 41 GHz silicon photonic modulator

The design and characterization of a slow-wave series push-pull traveling wave silicon photonic modulator is presented. At 2 V and 4 V reverse bias, the measured -3 dB electro-optic bandwidth of the modulator with an active length of 4 mm are 38 GHz and 41 GHz, respectively. Open eye diagrams are observed up to bitrates of 60 Gbps without any form of signal processing, and up to 70 Gbps with passive signal processing to compensate for the test equipment. With the use of multi-level amplitude modulation formats and digital-signal-processing, the modulator is shown to operate below a hard-decision forward error-correction threshold of 3.8×10-3 at bitrates up to 112 Gbps over 2 km of single mode optical fiber using PAM-4, and over 5 km of optical fiber with PAM-8. Energy consumed solely by the modulator is also estimated for different modulation cases.

Digital subcarrier multiplexing for fiber nonlinearity mitigation in coherent optical communication systems

In this work we experimentally investigate the improved intra-channel fiber nonlinearity tolerance of digital subcarrier multiplexed (SCM) signals in a single-channel coherent optical transmission system. The digital signal processing (DSP) for the generation and reception of the SCM signals is described. We show experimentally that the SCM signal with a nearly-optimum number of subcarriers can extend the maximum reach by 23% in a 24 GBaud DP-QPSK transmission with a BER threshold of 3.8 × 10(-3) and by 8% in a 24 GBaud DP-16-QAM transmission with a BER threshold of 2 × 10(-2). Moreover, we show by simulations that the improved performance of SCM signals is observed over a wide range of baud rates, further indicating the merits of SCM signals in baud-rate flexible agile transmissions and future high-speed optical transport systems.

Wavelength conversion of 28 GBaud 16-QAM signals based on four-wave mixing in a silicon nanowire.

We demonstrate error-free wavelength conversion of 28 GBaud 16-QAM single polarization (112 Gb/s) signals based on four-wave mixing in a dispersion engineered silicon nanowire (SNW). Wavelength conversion covering the entire C-band is achieved using a single pump. We characterize the performance of the wavelength converter subsystem through the electrical signal to noise ratio penalty as well as the bit error rate of the converted signal as a function of input signal power. Moreover, we evaluate the degradation of the optical signal to noise ratio due to wavelength conversion in the SNW.

224-Gb/s 10-km Transmission of PDM PAM-4 at 1.3 μm Using a Single Intensity-Modulated Laser and a Direct-Detection MIMO DSP-Based Receiver

A polarization-division-multiplexed (PDM) intensity-modulation/direct-detection (IM/DD) system enabled by a novel multiple-input and multiple-output DSP operating in the Stokes space following a DD receiver is demonstrated. Modulating the intensity of the two orthogonal polarization states of a single laser enables doubling the maximum achievable bit rate per wavelength channel, which halves the number of required laser sources in a transceiver using PDM and WDM to achieve an aggregate bit rate compared to using only WDM. Quantitatively, 224 Gb/s is experimentally transmitted over 10 km using a single 1310-nm laser and a silicon photonic intensity modulator using 56-Gbaud PDM PAM-4 with a BER of 4.1 × 10-3. Also, PDM enables halving the baud rate needed to achieve 112 Gb/s resulting in 20-km transmission at low BERs (10-5 -10-6), using either 56-Gbaud PAM-2 or 28-Gbaud PAM-4. These low pre-FEC BERs achieved at 112 Gb/s allow reducing the FEC overhead required compared to a single polarization system that employs twice the baud rate to achieve the same bit rate. Though the transceiver was implemented using discrete components, it can be fully integrated on a SiP chip, enabling its practical realization for short-reach optical interconnects inside datacenters. Finally, in addition to the experimental results, we perform simulations to further investigate the performance of the receiver. In particular, we studied the impact of varying the splitting ratios of the two couplers in the proposed front-end and concluded that using 67/33 couplers instead of 50/50 couplers renders the performance completely independent of the state of polarization of the received signal.

A family of Nyquist pulses for coherent optical communications

A new family of Nyquist pulses for coherent optical single carrier systems is introduced and is shown to increase the nonlinearity tolerance of dual-polarization (DP)-QPSK and DP-16-QAM systems. Numerical investigations for a single-channel 28 Gbaud DP-16-QAM long-haul system without optical dispersion compensation indicate that the proposed pulse can increase the reach distance by 26% and 19%, for roll-off factors of 1 and 2, respectively. In multi-channel transmissions and for a roll-off factor of 1, a reach distance increase of 20% is reported. Experimental results for DP-QPSK and DP-16-QAM systems at 10 Gbaud confirm the superior nonlinearity tolerance of the proposed pulse.

Advanced DSP Techniques Enabling High Spectral Efficiency and Flexible Transmissions: Toward elastic optical networks

In this article, we describe advances in digital signal processing (DSP) techniques that enable Tb/s transmission, and software-defined flexible transponders that support adaptive modulation formats and elastic optical networks (EONs).

Pilot-aided carrier phase recovery for M-QAM using superscalar parallelization based PLL.

In this paper, we present a carrier phase recovery (CPR) algorithm using a modified superscalar parallelization based phase locked loop (M-SSP-PLL) combined with a maximum-likelihood (ML) phase estimation. Compared to the original SSP-PLL, M-SSP-PLL + ML reduces the required buffer size using a novel superscalar structure. In addition, by removing the differential coding/decoding and employing ML phase recovery it also improves the performance. In simulation, we show that the laser linewidth tolerance of M-SSP-PLL + ML is comparable to blind phase search (BPS) algorithm, which is known to be one of the best CPR algorithms in terms of performance for arbitrary QAM formats. In 28 Gbaud QPSK (112 Gb/s) and 16-QAM (224 Gb/s), and 7 Gbaud 64-QAM (84 Gb/s) experiments, it is also demonstrated that M-SSP-PLL + ML can increase the transmission distance by at least 12% compared to BPS for each of them. Finally, the computational complexity is discussed and a significant reduction is shown for our algorithm with respect to BPS.