Hollow-Core NANF for High-Speed Short-Reach Transmission in the S+C+L-Bands

Hollow-core fibers offer a range of beneficial properties for high-speed optical communication applications, including low latency, low chromatic dispersion and nonlinearity. Based on a system employing a ∼5-km span of hollow-core nested antiresonant nodeless fiber (NANF), we demonstrate in this paper, penalty-free Nyquist 4-ary pulse amplitude modulation transmission relative to the back-to-back at 80, 100 and 112 Gb/s over the S+C+L-bands. Furthermore, using multi-carrier direct-detection optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, we show that compared to a standard single-mode fiber of a similar length, the NANF exhibits a significantly better bit error rate (BER) performance at 1550 nm and offers more than 20% capacity enhancement. Consequently, up to 138.09-Gb/s capacity has been achieved at a BER threshold of 3.8 × 10
⁻³
after ∼5-km transmission. We conclude that the use of NANF offers a promising solution for achieving simultaneously high capacity and low latency in future short-reach optical interconnects.