360-Gb/s Optical Transmitter With Arbitrary Modulation Format and Dispersion Precompensation

This letter introduces a versatile data-rate and modulation format transparent optical transmitter for 360-Gb/s transmission based on optical arbitrary waveform generation (OAWG) techniques. An experimental implementation of static OAWG, or line-by-line pulse shaping, with a silica arrayed-waveguide-grating pair waveform shaper, demonstrates creation of repetitive time-domain waveforms representing data packets in on-off keying and differential phase-shift-keying modulation formats with optional precompensation for fiber chromatic dispersion (CD). Transmission of repeated 9-bit 360-Gb/s data packets occupying 680 GHz of total optical bandwidth, with CD precompensation over a 10-km single-mode fiber link, indicates the potential for terabit-per-second operation. These data packets have a spectral efficiency of 0.53 b/s/Hz.