140/180/204-Gbaud OOK Transceiver for Inter- and Intra-Data Center Connectivity

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 100 Gbaud. For this, the transmitter makes the 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 preamplified 110-Gaz PIN photodiode prior to a 100-CHs analog-to-digital converter complete the ultrahigh bandwidth transceiver module; the device under study. In the experimental work, which discriminates between intra- and inter-data center scenarios (dispersion unmanaged 120, 560, and 960 m; and dispersion-managed 10 and 80 km of standard single-mode fiber), we evaluate the bit-error rate evolution against the received optical power at 140, 180, and 204 Gbaud 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 ultrahigh 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 140 Gbaud over the entire 100 m-80 km range with only linear feed-forward equalization. Then, the transmission of a 180-Gbaud ON OFF keying carrier over 80 km considering 20% error-correction overhead. Finally, a 10-km communication at 204 (Maud ON OFF keying with up to 6 dB sensitivity margin, and regular 7% overhead error-correction.
QC 20190222