High-speed PAM4-based optical SDM interconnects with directly modulated long-wavelength VCSEL

This paper reports the demonstration of high-speed PAM-4 transmission using a 1.5-μm single-mode vertical cavity surface emitting laser (SM-VCSEL) over multicore fiber with 7 cores over different distances. We have successfully generated up to 70 Gbaud 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) signals with a VCSEL in optical back-to-back, and transmitted 50 Gbaud PAM-4 signals over both 1-km dispersion-uncompensated and 10-km dispersion-compensated in each core, enabling a total data throughput of 700 Gbps over the 7-core fiber. Moreover, 56 Gbaud PAM-4 over 1-km have also been shown, whereby unfortunately not all cores provide the required 3.8 × 10 ^-3 bit error rate (BER) for the 7% overhead-hard decision forward error correction (7% OH-HDFEC). The limited bandwidth of the VCSEL and the adverse chromatic dispersion of the fiber are suppressed with pre-equalization based on accurate end-to-end channel characterizations. With a digital postequalization, BER performance below the 7% OH-HDFEC limit is achieved over all cores. The demonstrated results show a great potential to realize high-capacity and compact short-reach optical interconnects for data centers.