140/180/204-Gbaud OOK Transceiver for Inter- and Intra-Data Center Connectivity

We report on an on-off keying intensity-modulation and direct-detection C-band optical transceiver capable of addressing all datacenter interconnect environments at well beyond 100 Gbaud. For this, the transmitter makes the use of two key InP technologies: a 2:1 double heterojunction bipolar transistor selector multiplexer and a monolithically integrated distributed-feedback laser traveling-wave electro-absorption modulator, both exceeding 100-GHz of 3-dB analog bandwidth. A preamplified 110-GHz PIN photodiode prior to a 100-GHz analog-to-digital converter complete the ultrahigh bandwidth transceiver module; the device under study. In the experimental work, which discriminates between intra- and inter-data center scenarios (dispersion unmanaged 120, 560, and 960 m; and dispersion-managed 10 and 80 km of standard single-mode fiber), we evaluate the bit-error rate evolution against the received optical power at 140, 180, and 204 Gbaud on-off keying for different equalization configurations (adaptive linear filter with and without the help of short-memory sequence estimation) and forward error correction schemes (hard-decision codes with 7% and 20% overhead); drawing conclusions from the observed system-level limitations of the respective environments at this ultrahigh baudrate, as well as from the operation margins and sensitivity metrics. From the demonstration, we highlight three results: successful operation with >6-dB sensitivity margin below the 7% error-correction at 140 Gbaud over the entire 100 m-80 km range with only linear feed-forward equalization. Then, the transmission of a 180-Gbaud on-off keying carrier over 80 km considering 20% error-correction overhead. Finally, a 10-km communication at 204 Gbaud on-off keying with up to 6 dB sensitivity margin, and regular 7% overhead error-correction.