Multi-Tb/s Widely-Tunable DWDM Coherent Transmitter and Receiver Photonic Integrated Circuits

The last two decades have seen the emergence and wide-spread adoption of commercial photonic integrated circuits (PICs) in optical communications networks. Such PICs integrate hundreds of optical elements monolithically, and more recently utilize coherent modulation formats for improved spectral efficiency and transmission reach. These advances in PIC technology have contributed to more than an order of magnitude increase in chip capacity every decade, a trend that started with the development of electroabsorption-modulated lasers (deployed commercially for 2.5 Gb/s operation in 1996), and has continued through the commercial introduction of the system-on-chip (SOC) DWDM PICs in 2004 (operating at 100 Gb/s) and coherent SOC PICs in 2011 (operating at 500 Gb/s).

In this talk, we demonstrate both transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) coherent PICs, each integrating for the first time per-channel widely tunable lasers that enable continuous independent channel-level control across the entire C-band. Furthermore, this family of PICs has increased per-channel bit rate, with capability demonstrated at 33 and 44 Gbaud for polarization-multiplexed QPSK, 8-QAM and 16- QAM coherent modulation. Fourteen channel Tx and Rx PICs operating at 44 Gbaud result in record levels of integration of widely-tunable lasers, the first widely-tunable laser integrated in a multi-channel Tx and Rx, as well as record demonstrated capacity of 4.9 Tb/s capacity. The widely-tunable lasers integrated into the Tx and Rx PICs are shown to have excellent performance with over 35 nm tuning range and less than 200 kHz linewidth. RF data is provided for both fully packaged commercial transceiver modules which operate at 1.2 Tb/s (6 channels x 200 Gb/s per channel). The SOC DWDM multi-channel PIC platform is capable of scaling to significantly higher baud and symbol rates. Accordingly, we have realized 88 Gbaud, 16-QAM multi-channel and widely wavelength tunable coherent transmitter and receiver PICs, demonstrating a capacity in excess of 700 Gb/s per-channel over an 80 km unamplified link.

Fred A. Kish, Jr.

Senior Vice President, Infinera Corporation

Date: May 8, 2017 at 1:30 PM

Location: Monteith Research Center (MRC), Room 136

Distinguished Speaker Colloquium

Created and hosted by the NC State Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the ECE Distinguished Speaker Colloquium is our flagship seminar series, featuring presentations from distinguished speakers drawn from both academia and industry who will address a wide variety of topics of interest to our community. Everyone is invited to attend, from undergraduates on up to faculty and industry friends -- the level of the presentations will be for non-specialists and accessible to students.