High-Speed Performance Evaluation of Graded-Index Multicore Fiber Compatible With Multimode and Quasi-single Mode Operation

A comprehensive study on the optical characteristics and high-speed transmission performance of a hexagonally arrayed seven-core fiber supporting both multimode transmission at 850 nm and quasi-single mode transmission at 1310 and 1550 nm are presented. We investigated its optical and transmission characteristics such as inter-crosstalk, modal bandwidth, chromatic dispersion, and misalignment tolerance. The results show that the multicore fiber (MCF) has a high bandwidth at 850 nm while remaining a comparable performance with standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) at 1310 and 1550 nm. The worst inter-core crosstalk is less than -43 dB over a 10 km-long MCF connected with a pairwise fanin/fan-out devices. The minimum effective modal bandwidth of 8.44 GHz·km is achieved with the MCF for multimode operation, while the chromatic dispersion of the MCF at 1550 nm only increases by 7% compared with that of SSMF. In experiment, we successfully performed the 7 × 25 Gb/s multimode transmission over a 300 meter-long MCF at 850 nm and quasi-single mode transmission over a 12.4 and 10 km-long fiber at 1310 and 1550 nm, respectively, with an OOK modulation format. There was no obvious degradation observed when all cores operated simultaneously. Moreover, we carried out 7 × 50 Gb/s PAM4 transmission over a 300 meter-long and 10 km-long MCF at 850 and 1310 nm, respectively, as well as 7 × 40 Gb/s PAM4 transmission over a 10 km-long MCF at 1550 nm. A BER which is well below the forward error correction (FEC) threshold (5 × 10
^-5
) was reached for different MCF links.