Challenges in Scalling Transceiver Bit Rate to 1.6Tbps and Beyond

Optical transceivers must meet the rising capacity demands as well as stringent cost and power consumption requirements in next-generation optical networks. In this paper, we discuss the limitations of conventional transmitter approaches in scaling to high constellation orders for data centre interconnection links. In addition, we discuss and explore critical operational aspects for our newly proposed optical digital-to-analog (DAC) based transmitter that promises to achieve terabit-per-second scalability by utilizing low-order electronic DACs.