Enhanced performance of 400 Gb/s DML-based CAP systems using optical filtering technique for short reach...

A parallel transmission approach is more likely to realize 400 Gb/s and above short reach transmission as it helps to reduce the cost of both electrical and optical device largely. Directly modulated lasers (DML) are more attractive in 400 Gb/s approach, because it requires relatively small amount of driving power and has low insertion loss, thus lowering its cost. However, the intrinsic chirp will degrade the transmission performance. In this paper, an optical filtering technique is introduced for 400 Gb/s high-speed DML-based carrierless amplitude and phase (CAP) modulation short reach systems for the first time. Owing to the additional optical filter, 1 dB and 3.6 dB sensitivity improvement at BER of 3.8 x 10(-3) is obtained for the back-to-back and 15 km fiber link transmission for single lane at the bitrate of 28 Gb/s. Then a 16-lane CAP16 system with a total bit rate of 413 Gb/s is demonstrated experimentally using low-cost 10 GHz-class DML using optical filtering technique.