Anisotropy-free arrayed waveguide gratings on X-cut thin film lithium niobate platform of in-plane anisotropy.

Arrayed waveguide grating is a versatile and scalable integrated light dispersion device, which has been widely adopted in various applications, including, optical communications and optical sensing. Recently, thin-film lithium niobate emerges as a promising photonic integration platform, due to its ability of shrinking largely the size of typical lithium niobate based optical devices. This would also enable multifunctional photonic integrated chips on a single lithium niobate substrate. However, due to the intrinsic anisotropy of the material, to build an arrayed waveguide grating on X-cut thin-film lithium niobate has never been successful. Here, a universal strategy to design anisotropy-free dispersive components on a uniaxial in-plane anisotropic photonic integration platform is introduced for the first time. This leads to the first implementation of arrayed waveguide gratings on X-cut thin-film lithium niobate with various configurations and high-performances. The best insertion loss of 2.4 dB and crosstalk of -24.1 dB is obtained for the fabricated arrayed waveguide grating devices. Applications of such arrayed waveguide gratings as a wavelength router and in a wavelength-division multiplexed optical transmission system are also demonstrated.

Sharp bend and large FSR ring resonator based on the free-form curves on a thin-film lithium niobate platform.

Sharp bends are crucial for large-scale and high-density photonics integration on thin-film lithium niobate platform. In this study, we demonstrate low-loss (<0.05 dB) and sharp bends (Reff = 30 µm) using free-form curves with a 200-nm-thick slab and a rib height of 200 nm on x-cut lithium niobate. Employing the same design method, we successfully realize a compact fully-etched ring resonator with a remarkably large free spectral range of 10.36 nm experimentally. Notably, the equivalent radius of the ring resonator is a mere 15 µm, with a loaded Q factor reaching 2.2 × 104.

Adaptive-memory-length look-up table (LUT)-based digital pre-distortion for IM/DD underwater wireless optical communications.

A digital pre-distortion (DPD) scheme based on an adaptive-memory-length look-up table (AML-LUT) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated in a four-level pulse amplitude modulation (4-PAM) underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) system. By implementing adaptive memory length for each pattern in the AML-LUT-based DPD, the size of the AML-LUT can be significantly reduced without sacrificing performance compared to both the full-size LUT and the multi-symbol simplified look-up table (MSS-LUT)-based DPDs. The performance of the proposed AML-LUT-based DPD is experimentally evaluated for a 625 Mbit/s 4-PAM UOWC over 1 m transmission length. Experimental results show that compared with the full-size LUT with a memory length of 7 (LUT-7)-based DPD, the proposed AML-LUT-based DPD (i) incurs a marginal power penalty of 0.5 dB at both the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) and KP4-FEC threshold limits, while simultaneously reducing the implementation complexity (i.e., the LUT size) by 93%; (ii) achieves comparable transmission performance compared to the MSS-LUT-based DPD, while reducing the implementation complexity by 89%; and (iii) shows great potential for high-speed, low-complexity and memory-efficient intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) UOWC and short-reach optical interconnects.

High-speed polarization tracking using thin film lithium niobate integrated dynamic polarization controller.

Dynamic polarization controllers (DPCs) are essential devices in various optical applications. We develop a thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) integrated DPC driven by the real-time implemented Jacobian control algorithm for fast polarization tracking. Experimental results demonstrate a high polarization tracking speed of 100 krad/s when targeting a specific linear state of polarization, with a low control loop delay of 420 ns, half-wave control voltages of 2.75 V, and a fast polarization restoring time of 1.6 us. Compared to previously reported integrated DPCs, the TFLN-based DPC achieves significantly higher tracking speed and lower loop delay. The results highlight the effectiveness of the Jacobian method and the outstanding performance of TFLN-based DPCs. The study opens up possibilities for further advancements in DPC solutions using TFLN technology.

Low-complexity frequency-domain nonlinear equalizer with absolute operation for underwater wireless optical communications.

A low-complexity 3rd-order frequency-domain nonlinear equalizer (FD-NLE) with absolute operation is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for underwater wireless optical communications (UWOC). In the proposed FD-NLE scheme, absolute operation and fast Fourier transform (FFT) with multiplication operations are utilized instead of the square and convolution operations used in conventional polynomial nonlinear equalizers (PNLEs), respectively. Therefore, complexity reductions by over 77.3% and 66.9% can be achieved compared with those of PNLE and PNLE with absolute operation, respectively, with a memory length larger than 8. A UWOC system using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals with adaptive bit and power loading is also demonstrated to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Experimental results show that data rate increments by ∼ 5.6% and ∼ 5.7% at BER below 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) limit of 3.8 × 10-3, compared with PNLE and PNLE with absolute operation, respectively, are realized using the proposed scheme. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme has an up to 14.7% complexity reduction compared with conventional frequency-domain PNLE (FD-PNLE), while maintaining similar equalization performance.

Compact 100GBaud driverless thin-film lithium niobate modulator on a silicon substrate.

Electro-optic (EO) modulators with a high modulation bandwidth are indispensable parts of an optical interconnect system. A key requirement for an energy-efficient EO modulator is the low drive voltage, which can be provided using a standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor circuity without an amplifying driver. Thin-film lithium niobate has emerged as a new promising platform, and shown its capable of achieving driverless and high-speed EO modulators. In this paper, we report a compact high-performance modulator based on the thin-film lithium niobate platform on a silicon substrate. The periodic capacitively loaded travelling-wave electrode is employed to achieve a large modulation bandwidth and a low drive voltage, which can support a driverless single-lane 100Gbaud operation. The folded modulation section design also helps to reduce the device length by almost two thirds. The fabricated device represents a large EO bandwidth of 45GHz with a half-wave voltage of 0.7V. The driverless transmission of a 100Gbaud 4-level pulse amplitude modulation signal is demonstrated with a power consumption of 4.49fj/bit and a bit-error rate below the KP4 forward-error correction threshold of 2.4×10-4.

Comparison of low-complexity sparse and weight-sharing nonlinear equalizers for C-band 100-Gbit/s DSB PAM-4 transmission over 60-km SSMF.

To cope with the nonlinear distortions and the chromatic dispersion (CD) induced power fading in double-side band (DSB) intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) transmission systems, high-performance Volterra nonlinear equalizers (VNLEs) including Volterra feed-forward equalizer (VFFE) and Volterra decision-feedback equalizer (VDFE) are widely applied. However, the conventional VNLEs have high computational complexity, especially for longer memory lengths. In this paper, based on sparse and weight-sharing strategies for significant kernel reduction, we propose four low-complexity NLEs including a sparse diagonally pruned VDFE (S-DP-VDFE), a sparse diagonally pruned absolute-term DFE (S-DP-ATDFE), a weight-sharing DP-VDFE (WS-DP-VDFE), and a weight-sharing DP-ATDFE (WS-DP-ATDFE), and present a comprehensive comparison among them in terms of computational complexity and bit error ratio (BER) performance in a C-band 100-Gbit/s PAM-4 transmission system over 60-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF). The experimental results show that the proposed S-DP-VDFE and WS-DP-VDFE not only exhibit comparable performance with the conventional DP-VDFE but also reduce the complexity by 54.5% and 45.9%, respectively. While the proposed S-DP-ATDFE and WS-DP-ATDFE yield lower complexity at the expense of a slight performance degradation. Compared with the proposed S-DP-VDFE, S-DP-ATDFE, and WS-DP-VDFE, the proposed WS-DP-ATDFE with the lowest number of real-valued multiplications of 45 achieves up to 90.9%, 81.6%, and 95.8% complexity reduction, respectively, at the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) BER limit of 3.8 × 10-3. The proposed low-complexity WS-DP-ATDFE shows great potential in low-cost and high-performance IM/DD optical transmission systems.

High modulation efficiency and large bandwidth thin-film lithium niobate modulator for visible light.

We experimentally demonstrate an integrated visible light modulator at 532 nm on the thin-film lithium niobate platform. The waveguides on such platform feature a propagation loss of 2.2 dB/mm while a grating for fiber interface has a coupling loss of 5 dB. Our fabricated modulator demonstrates a low voltage-length product of 1.1 V·cm and a large electro-optic bandwidth with a roll-off of -1.59 dB at 25 GHz for a length of 3.3 mm. This device offers a compact and large bandwidth solution to the challenge of integrated visible wavelength modulation in lithium niobate and paves the way for future small-form-factor integrated systems at visible wavelengths.

Fabrication tolerant and broadband polarization splitter-rotator based on adiabatic mode evolution on thin-film lithium niobate.

A polarization splitter-rotator device can facilitate on-chip polarization-division multiplexing to enhance the transmission data rate. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a polarization splitter-rotator based on adiabatic mode evolution on the thin-film lithium niobate platform. The measured results for a fabricated device show low insertion losses of <-0.5 dB and large extinction ratios of >20 dB over the 110-nm band. Large fabrication tolerance is also demonstrated with extinction ratios of >15 dB in the wavelength range of 1465-1630 nm for a waveguide width variation of 80 nm.

Low-complexity sparse absolute-term based nonlinear equalizer for C-band IM/DD systems.

A low-complexity sparse absolute-term based nonlinear equalizer (AT-NLE) is proposed to eliminate the nonlinear signal distortions for intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) systems. By performing the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm to adaptively obtain the significant kernels of both the linear and absolute terms, the computational complexity of the proposed sparse AT-NLE is dramatically reduced and independent of the memory length. The performance of the proposed sparse AT-NLE is experimentally evaluated in a C-band 56-Gbit/s four-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) system over a 30-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF). Experimental results show that compared with the conventional diagonally-pruned Volterra nonlinear equalizer (DP-VNLE) or DP-AT-NLE, the proposed sparse AT-NLE saves 77.7% or 76% real-valued multiplications when their achieved bit error ratios (BERs) are similar. Meanwhile, the proposed sparse AT-NLE reduces the computational complexity by > 28% compared to the sparse DP-VNLE at a BER of 5 × 10-4. The proposed low-complexity sparse AT-NLE shows great potential for high-performance and low-cost IM/DD optical transmission systems.

Folded thin-film lithium niobate modulator based on a poled Mach-Zehnder interferometer structure.

The thin-film lithium niobate structure has been used recently to construct compact and high-performance electro-optical modulators. Due to the moderate electro-optical coefficient of the lithium niobate material, the device length of such a modulator is still long, a few centimeters usually. Here, a folded Mach-Zehnder interferometer based modulator on x-cut thin-film lithium niobate is demonstrated. An effective poling procedure is developed to activate the device. The proposed modulator structure can shorten the device length without affecting its performance. The measured VπL product of a fabricated and completely poled folded modulator is about 2.74V⋅cm, and the 3 dB electro-optical bandwidth is about 55 GHz. They are close to those of a conventional Mach-Zehnder modulator with a straight modulation section.

Two-dimensional grating coupler on an X-cut lithium niobate thin-film.

A two-dimensional grating coupler for coupling light between a standard single-mode fiber and ridge waveguides on an X-cut lithium niobate thin-film is designed and demonstrated. Using circular holes for grating cells, simulated coupling losses reach -3.88 dB at 1550 nm and -5.78 dB at 1563 nm with 1-dB bandwidths of 49 nm and 45 nm for P-polarized and S-polarized light inputs, respectively. Experimentally, peak coupling losses of -5.13 dB at 1561 nm and -7.6 dB at 1568 nm are obtained for P-polarized and S-polarized light inputs, respectively, and corresponding 1 dB bandwidths are about 30 nm. An approach to improve the coupling performance of the grating coupler is also proposed using two crossing ellipses as grating cells as well as a bottom metal reflector. The coupling loss and the polarization dependent loss are decreased to around -3.4 dB and 0.44 dB, respectively.

Chromatic dispersion mitigation using a SEFDM-based diversity technique for IM/DD long reach optical links.

Spectral efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM) can offer a higher spectral efficiency (SE) than orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In this work, we propose a diversity technique based on SEFDM for beyond 100-Gb/s optical intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) long reach (LR) applications. We mathematically demonstrate that the self-created inter-carrier interference of SEFDM signals can be reused to achieve a diversity gain on each sub-carrier and, in turn, improve the tolerance to power fading induced by chromatic dispersion (CD) in IM/DD LR links. Based on the proposed diversity technique, we further demonstrated a 112-Gb/s SEFDM transmission over 80-km standard single-mode fiber, using only 28-GHz bandwidth and modulation format of up to 16-QAM. Experimental results show that SEFDM with the proposed diversity technique performs robust against CD effects and outperforms the conventional OFDM with adaptive bit and power loading of the same bandwidth and data rate, which validates the superiority of the proposed SEFDM in optical IM/DD LR transmissions.

Modulation-format-transparent IQ imbalance estimation of dual-polarization optical transmitter based on maximum likelihood independent component analysis.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a modulation-format-transparent dual-polarization (DP) transmitter (Tx) in-phase/quadrature (IQ) imbalance estimation scheme based on maximum likelihood independent component analysis (ML-ICA). The proposed scheme can separate Tx IQ imbalance from polarization crosstalk and phase noise and achieve accurate IQ imbalance estimation without training data and the information of modulation format. Firstly, the complex-ML-ICA is used to implement format-transparent polarization de-multiplexing to remove polarization crosstalk; then the real-ML-ICA is employed to estimate inverse IQ mixing matrix and compensate Tx IQ imbalance/phase noise on each polarization channel. Inverse IQ mixing matrix contains the information of phase noise and Tx IQ imbalance; Finally, Tx IQ imbalance is derived from the inverse matrix by analytic method. The impact of Tx IQ imbalance on polarization demultiplexing and carrier phase recovery (CPE) is investigated by numerical simulation from three aspects of Jones space, Stokes space, and Kurtosis. The simulation results demonstrate the proposed scheme has strong robustness to phase noise, quantization noise, and amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise. The proposed ML-ICA algorithm is verified experimentally in polarization division multiplexing (PDM) quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK)/8 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)/16QAM/64QAM systems. The experimental results show the scheme can accurately estimate Tx IQ imbalance within wide range in a format transparent manner.

120 Gbaud PAM-4 transmission over 80-km SSMF using optical band interleaving and Kramers-Kronig detection.

We demonstrate generation and detection of 120-Gbaud PAM-4 signals using an I/Q modulator based on optical band interleaving (OBI) technique. The spectral components of target PAM signals are split and pre-processed before being sent to two digital-to-analog convertors (sub-DACs) whose outputs are imprinted to an optical carrier by an optical I/Q modulator forming a carrier-suppressed tandem single side-band (SSB) signal. The PAM signals can be recovered after photo-detection provided that an optical beating tone is added at the edge of the signal spectrum along with the modulator output. The proposed method requires only half of the Nyquist bandwidth of the target PAM signal for the transmitter and has the advantage of a simple implementation. Using Kramers-Kronig (K-K) detection, a 120 Gbaud PAM-4 transmission over 80-km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) is successfully demonstrated. The proposed scheme entails a simple implementation and a much lower bandwidth requirement at the transmitter compared with conventional all-electronic high baud rate signal generation schemes.

Transmitter and receiver DSP for 112 Gbit/s PAM-4 amplifier-less transmissions using 25G-class EML and APD.

The transmission performance of 112 Gbit/s PAM-4 signal with commercial 25 G-class EML and APD is experimentally studied by using advanced digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms, i.e. pre-equalization (Pre-EQ), error-table based pre-correction (ETC), least-mean square (LMS) based equalization, direct detection faster than Nyquist (DD-FTN) algorithm. Among them, Pre-EQ and ETC are implemented at the transmitter, and ETC is a symbol-pattern-dependent pre-compensation algorithm based on the look-up-table approach. In order to obtain these pre-compensated parameters readily, a joint equalization and error table generation (JEEG) module is proposed. Employing the combination of ETC, LMS, and DD-FTN, a single line 112 Gbit/s PAM-4 40 km amplifier-less transmission with a record receiver sensitivity of -16.6 dBm (at 7% HD-FEC threshold) is experimentally demonstrated. In addition, the computational complexities of different DSP schemes are analyzed and discussed in detail. The receiver computational complexity can be effectively reduced by employing appropriate ETC and Pre-EQ in the transmitter.

Nonlinearity-aware 200 Gbit/s DMT transmission for C-band short-reach optical interconnects with a single packaged electro-absorption modulated laser.

We experimentally demonstrate the transmission of a 200 Gbit/s discrete multitone (DMT) at the soft forward error correction limit in an intensity-modulation direct-detection system with a single C-band packaged distributed feedback laser and traveling-wave electro absorption modulator (DFB-TWEAM), digital-to-analog converter and photodiode. The bit-power loaded DMT signal is transmitted over 1.6 km standard single-mode fiber with a net rate of 166.7 Gbit/s, achieving an effective electrical spectrum efficiency of 4.93 bit/s/Hz. Meanwhile, net rates of 174.2 Gbit/s and 179.5 Gbit/s are also demonstrated over 0.8 km SSMF and in an optical back-to-back case, respectively. The feature of the packaged DFB-TWEAM is presented. The nonlinearity-aware digital signal processing algorithm for channel equalization is mathematically described, which improves the signal-to-noise ratio up to 3.5 dB.

150-Gb/s SEFDM IM/DD transmission using log-MAP Viterbi decoding for short reach optical links.

Spectral efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM) can improve the spectral efficiency for next-generation optical and wireless communications. In this work, we apply SEFDM in beyond 100-Gb/s optical intensity modulation and direct detection transmissions and propose a low-complexity logarithmic-maximum-a-posteriori (log-MAP) Viterbi decoding algorithm to achieve the maximum likelihood (ML) detection. We evaluate the likelihood of detections using a posteriori probability instead of Euclidean distance by taking both noise and inter-carrier interference into consideration. In order to balance the performance and complexity, we then employ Viterbi decoding principle to retain only certain paths with ML detections (a.k.a., the surviving paths) while discarding the others during the decoding procedure. Results show that the proposed log-MAP Viterbi decoding scheme achieves optimal performance due to the precise likelihood evaluation, which guarantees the retention of the global ML detection. By using the proposed decoding scheme, the data rate of SEFDM signals can reach 150-Gb/s in a 2-km standard single mode fiber transmission, using only 28-GHz bandwidth and 16-QAM modulation. Experimental results show that the 16-QAM modulated SEFDM signal with a bandwidth compression factor of 0.8 outperforms 32-QAM modulated OFDM, while both signals have the same bandwidth (28-GHz) and data rate (140-Gb/s), which demonstrate the superiority of SEFDM in optical short reach applications.

Integrated wavelength conversion for adaptively modulated WDM-OFDM signals in a silicon waveguide.

All-optical wavelength conversion for 2×11.64 GBaud adaptively-modulated orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (AM-OFDM) signals with QPSK/16QAM formats is experimentally demonstrated in a silicon waveguide. The AM-OFDM signal with partly higher- (and lower-) order formats on lower- (and higher-) frequency subcarriers has better overall conversion performance in receiving optical signal-to-noise ratio and power penalty. In comparison with the OFDM-QPSK signal, at the BER of 3.8×10-3, the bit rate increases 11.64 Gbit/s per channel almost without conversion power penalty increased by replacing the QPSK sequence with the 16QAM sequence on half subcarriers.

Accurate and spectral efficient channel estimation using inter-block precoding and superimposed pilots in optical OFDM systems.

A new inter-block precoding-based channel estimation (CE) scheme is proposed and experimentally demonstrated in an optical OFDM system with a superimposed pilot (SP). The proposed inter-block precoding scheme targets on eliminating the statistical mean of the unknown data symbols, and thereby improves the performance of SP-aided CE. We investigate the impact that both the precoding matrix and SP have on the system performance, from which we obtain the optimum value of signal-to-pilot power ratio (SPR) as well as the block length. We show through simulations and experiments that the proposed CE scheme, in comparison with the conventional preamble based scheme, has the advantage of entailing a much smaller overhead size, while offering similar performance in terms of CE accuracy and bit-error ratio (BER) performances. Furthermore, the proposed precoding scheme has no limit to the design of SP, and thus is applicable for any periodic pilots.