Ultrafast optical circuit switching for data centers using integrated soliton microcombs.

Due to the slowdown of Moore's law, it will become increasingly challenging to efficiently scale the network in current data centers utilizing electrical packet switches as data rates grow. Optical circuit switches (OCS) represent an appealing option to overcome this issue by eliminating the need for expensive and power-hungry transceivers and electrical switches in the core of the network. In particular, optical switches based on tunable lasers and arrayed waveguide grating routers are quite promising due to the use of a passive core, which increases fault tolerance and reduces management overhead. Such an OCS-network can offer high bandwidth, low network latency and an energy-efficient and scalable data center network. To support dynamic data center workloads efficiently, however, it is critical to switch between wavelengths at nanosecond (ns) timescales. Here we demonstrate ultrafast OCS based on a microcomb and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs). Using a photonic integrated Si3N4 microcomb, sub-ns (<520 ps) switching along with the 25-Gbps non-return-to-zero (NRZ) and 50-Gbps four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) burst mode data transmission is achieved. Further, we use a photonic integrated circuit comprising an Indium phosphide based SOA array and an arrayed waveguide grating to show sub-ns switching (<900 ps) along with 25-Gbps NRZ burst mode transmission providing a path towards a more scalable and energy-efficient wavelength-switched network for data centers in the post Moore's Law era.

Simple laser transmitter pair as polarization-independent coherent homodyne detector.

Coherent optical reception promises performance gains for a wide range of telecom applications and photonic sensing. However, the practical implementation and the particular realization of homodyne detection is by no means straight-forward. Local oscillator requirements and polarization management need to be cost-effectively supported for accurate signal detection at high sensitivity, preferably without relying on digital processing resources. Towards this direction we propose a conceptually simple, laser-based homodyne receiver. We exploit the injection locking of a pair of externally modulated lasers that simultaneously serve as optically synchronized local oscillators and photodetectors in a polarization-diversity analogue coherent receiver arrangement. We demonstrate signal detection at 2.5 Gb/s over an optical budget of 35 dB and a dynamic range of >20 dB. Long-term measurements over field-installed fiber confirm the correct operation independent of the polarization state of light. Stability considerations for the injection locking process are drawn in view of even higher loss budgets.

Partial response signaling for improved chromatic dispersion tolerance in intensity modulation optical transmissions.

We investigate partial response signaling (PRS) as a way of increasing the transmission length achievable by direct detection optical systems. The performance of the duobinary and PRS modulations is evaluated against that of conventional on-off-keying (OOK). We prove by simulation and experimentally that duobinary increases the link distance by up to 1.5 times and PRS by up to 3 times, when no signal processing is employed. The gain is preserved even when equalization is used. PRS is employed also with 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) and is shown to improve the transmission distance by almost 3 times.

Cost-effective single-lane 112 Gb/s solution for mobile fronthaul and access applications.

We experimentally demonstrate the possibility of transmitting 112 Gb/s PAM-4 signals over 30-km standard single-mode fibers with commercial 20-GHz components. The impact on system performance of three different equalization schemes-feed-forward equalizer (FFE), Volterra filter (VF), and maximum likelihood sequence estimator (MLSE)-is investigated and compared. We prove that the |x| and x|x| components of the VF can efficiently reduce the chirp-induced signal skew distortion, and that an MLSE with only four states can be used to remove the error floor. In contrast, the performance of FFE is worse than that of VF with a 4-state MLSE, even when a 64-state MLSE is used.

Optimal wavelength-space crossbar switches for supercomputer optical interconnects.

We propose a most economical design of the Optical Shared MemOry Supercomputer Interconnect System (OSMOSIS) all-optical, wavelength-space crossbar switch fabric. It is shown, by analysis and simulation, that the total number of on-off gates required for the proposed N × N switch fabric can scale asymptotically as N ln N if the number of input/output ports N can be factored into a product of small primes. This is of the same order of magnitude as Shannon's lower bound for switch complexity, according to which the minimum number of two-state switches required for the construction of a N × N permutation switch is log2 (N!).

100 Gbit/s hybrid optical fiber-wireless link in the W-band (75-110 GHz).

We experimentally demonstrate an 100 Gbit/s hybrid optical fiber-wireless link by employing photonic heterodyning up-conversion of optical 12.5 Gbaud polarization multiplexed 16-QAM baseband signal with two free running lasers. Bit-error-rate performance below the FEC limit is successfully achieved for air transmission distances up to 120 cm.