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 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 power budget margins and sensitivity metrics. From the demonstration, we highlight three results: successful operation with more than 6-dB operation 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 operation margin, and regular 7%-overhead error-correction.