Pairwise Transmission to Break the Fiber Dispersion Barrier of High-Speed Multilane IM-DD Systems
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Chromatic dispersion (CD) remains a critical performance barrier in high-speed intensity-modulation direct-detection (IM-DD) fiber-optic transmission systems, including the de-facto standard multilane ones. Current single-lane CD mitigation approaches are facing bottlenecks in DSP complexity. Here we unveil a CD-barrier-breaking paradigm in which transceiving processes are jointly designed across multiple spatial or wavelength lanes, termed as “pairwise/groupwise transmission”. It aims to be compliant with the multilane architecture, meanwhile preserving the simplicity of IM-DD. We first theoretically show one of the viable pairwise coding conditions (PCC) that can remove fading, a dominant part of the CD barrier. Next, an efficient optoelectronic implementation of pairwise transmitter (Tx) satisfying this PCC is presented. Furthermore, theoretical bit error rate of pairwise transmission is derived and discussed considering ideal or mismatched lanes and digital equalizers. In addition, we experimentally validate 224Gb/s (112Gb/s/lane) transmissions with various link configurations in the challenging 1.55-μm band. In optical amplification (OA)-free cases, pairwise transmission enables 4-fold reach extension compared to conventional IM-DD only using low-complexity linear equalizers. OA-assisted 80km transmission is also verified.
Source: Journal of Lightwave Technology
Language: English
Topic: Optical Network Technologies
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,645
OpenAlex ID: W4415748280