High-Temperature Insensitivity of 50-Gb/s 16-QAM-DMT Transmission by Using the Temperature-Compensated Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers

In this study, a 50-Gb/s 16-quadrature amplitude modulation discrete multitone (16-QAM-DMT) was applied to an 850-nm oxide-confined vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) at various temperature ranging from 25 °C to 85 °C. This study reports the highest bit rate for directly modulated VCSELs operating at 85 °C, in addition to demonstrating, for the first time, 16-QAM-DMT with less dependence on slope efficiency (SE) reduction. By using a temperature-compensated VCSEL, this study determined the degradation of the bit error rate (BER) in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio. The analysis results demonstrate that the transmission quality is dominated by optical bandwidth rather than the SE. Therefore, the preleveling technique was applied for error rate recovery to reduce the BER from 6.3 × 10
^-3
to 3.8 × 10
^-3
with a 0.2-dB/GHz preleveling slope. Thus, a low-bandwidth system (nearly 10 GHz) was realized for high data-rate transmissions (50 Gb/s) at 85 °C. The 16-QAM-DMT transmission provides an effective approach to alleviating thermal problems that occur in high-speed optical communication without the requirement of any external amplification circuits.