Prototype of DSP-Free IM/DD MDM Transceiver for Datacenter Interconnection

New transmission techniques for short-reach optical transmission applications especially datacenter interconnections are highly expected to break current bandwidth bottleneck, among which mode division multiplexing (MDM) based on few-mode fiber (FMF) is promising by exploring different linearly-polarized (LP) modes as spatial transmission channels. In this paper, an FMF design utilizing multiple-ring perturbations in fiber core to suppress modal crosstalk during fiber transmission is firstly proposed and a 6-LP-mode double-ring-core (DRC) FMF is fabricated with a high minimum refractive index difference of 1.49 × 10
⁻³
among all LP modes. Secondly, a novel degenerate-mode-selective coupler (DMSC) converting each degenerate LP
_lm
(
l
> 0) mode into the LP
₁₁
mode in a two-mode fiber is proposed. Then intensity-modulation/direct-detection (IM/DD) MDM transmission scheme without any digital signal processing (DSP) can be realized utilizing mode multiplexer/demultiplexer (MUX/DEMUX) consisting of cascaded all-fiber mode-selective couplers (MSC) and DMSCs, in which each degenerate or non-degenerate LP mode is considered as an independent transmission channel. Based on the proposed DRC-FMF and mode MUX/DEMUX, we demonstrate a 4-LP-mode MDM prototype system using commercial single-mode 10-Gbps SFP + modules and 4K video transceivers without any hardware or software modifications. Finally, the intra-LP-mode dispersion effect in a weakly-coupled FMF is analyzed and a modified fixed-analyzer method is proposed for its measurement. Experimental results show that it may be one of the major impairments for IM/DD MDM transmission.