Nonlinearity Tolerant High-Speed DMT Transmission With 1.5-μm Single-Mode VCSEL and Multi-Core Fibers for Optical Interconnects

We experimentally demonstrate the generation of 107-Gbit/s net-rate optical discrete multitone signal using a 1.5-μm single-mode vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) with modulation bandwidth of 22 GHz. Utilizing a nonlinearity-tolerant channel equalization algorithm for digital signal processing, total net-rates of 726.6-Gbit/s over 2.5-km dispersion-uncompensated 7-core fiber and 533.1-Gbit/s over 10-km dispersion-compensated 7-core fiber below 7% overhead hard-decision forward error correction limit have been experimentally achieved with a 1.5-μm VCSEL-based intensity-modulation direct-detection system. The features of the 1.5-μm single-mode VCSEL, 2.5-km/10-km multi-core fibers, and fan-in/fan-out modules are presented. Besides, the Volterra series-based nonlinearity-tolerant channel equalization algorithm, which improves the signal-to-noise ratio with more than 5 dB, is mathematically described and experimentally validated. The results have demonstrated that 1.5-μm single-mode VCSEL and multi-core-fiber-based transmission can be a promising candidate to solve the capacity challenges in short-reach optical interconnects.