A Cost-Effective 2-Channel OTDM System Implemented with Sinusoidally Modulated Light Source

• Published in: IEEE access 2020-01, Vol.8, p.1-1
• Main Authors: Bae, Sunghyun, Park, Jongwoo, Han, Seungjun, Kim, Byung Gon, Kim, Minsik, Yu, Kyoungsik, Chung, Yun C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Equalizers; Erbium; Laser mode locking; Light sources; Lithium niobates; Mach-Zehnder interferometers; MIMO communication; Modulators; Optical communication; Optical device fabrication; Optical interconnects; Optical modulation; Optical pulses; Optical time-division multiplexing; Optical transmitters; pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM); Quadratures; Signal processing
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3016969

We propose to implement a 2-channel optical-time-division-multiplexed (OTDM) system for short-reach optical interconnects by using a sinusoidally modulated light source instead of a complicated mode-locked laser as an input pulse source. In this system, the OTDM signal is obtained by bit-interleaving two optical return-to-zero (RZ) signals generated by using the sinusoidally modulated light. We operate these RZ signals in the orthogonal in-phase and quadrature domains to avoid the unwanted beat components. After the transmission, the OTDM signal is detected by using single photodetector, and then processed by a 2×2 multiple-input multiple-output equalizer. For a demonstration, we generate 150-Gb/s OTDM signal operating in the 8-level pulse-amplitude modulated (PAM-8) format by using commercial LiNbO3 Mach-Zehnder modulators and transmit this OTDM signal over 1.9 km of the standard single-mode fiber (SSMF). In addition, we fabricate the proposed OTDM transmitter in an integrated silicon-photonics chip and use it to demonstrate the transmission of the 64-Gb/s OTDM PAM-4 signal over 2.2 km of SSMF.