224-Gb/s 10-km Transmission of PDM PAM-4 at 1.3 μm Using a Single Intensity-Modulated Laser and a Direct-Detection MIMO DSP-Based Receiver

A polarization-division-multiplexed (PDM) intensity-modulation/direct-detection (IM/DD) system enabled by a novel multiple-input and multiple-output DSP operating in the Stokes space following a DD receiver is demonstrated. Modulating the intensity of the two orthogonal polarization states of a single laser enables doubling the maximum achievable bit rate per wavelength channel, which halves the number of required laser sources in a transceiver using PDM and WDM to achieve an aggregate bit rate compared to using only WDM. Quantitatively, 224 Gb/s is experimentally transmitted over 10 km using a single 1310-nm laser and a silicon photonic intensity modulator using 56-Gbaud PDM PAM-4 with a BER of 4.1 × 10
^-3
. Also, PDM enables halving the baud rate needed to achieve 112 Gb/s resulting in 20-km transmission at low BERs (10
^-5
-10
^-6
), using either 56-Gbaud PAM-2 or 28-Gbaud PAM-4. These low pre-FEC BERs achieved at 112 Gb/s allow reducing the FEC overhead required compared to a single polarization system that employs twice the baud rate to achieve the same bit rate. Though the transceiver was implemented using discrete components, it can be fully integrated on a SiP chip, enabling its practical realization for short-reach optical interconnects inside datacenters. Finally, in addition to the experimental results, we perform simulations to further investigate the performance of the receiver. In particular, we studied the impact of varying the splitting ratios of the two couplers in the proposed front-end and concluded that using 67/33 couplers instead of 50/50 couplers renders the performance completely independent of the state of polarization of the received signal.