Receive-diversity-aided power-fading compensation for C-band IM/DD OFDM systems.

A receive-diversity-aided power-fading compensation (RDA-PFC) scheme is proposed and demonstrated to eliminate the chromatic dispersion (CD)-induced power fading for C-band double-sideband (DSB) intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. By combining the responses before and after a dispersive element using a maximal-ratio combining (MRC) algorithm, the CD-induced power fading dips within the signal bandwidth of around 50 GHz can be effectively compensated for, which results in an up to 17.6-dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement for the fading subcarriers after transmission over 10 km of standard single-mode fiber (SSMF). Using the 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) format, a diversity receiver with the proposed RDA-PFC scheme can support 170.6-Gbit/s OFDM signal transmission over a 10-km SSMF and reduces the bit error rate (BER) by more than an order of magnitude compared with a conventional receiver. Moreover, 208.1-Gbit/s adaptive bit and power loading OFDM signal transmission over a 10-km SSMF is realized by the proposed RDA-PFC scheme, which improves the capacity by 15.3% compared with the case without RDA-PFC at a BER of 3.8 × 10-3. The proposed RDA-PFC scheme shows great potential in CD-induced power-fading compensation for high-speed IM/DD OFDM systems.

Highly sensitive gas pressure sensor based on the hollow core Bragg fiber and harmonic Vernier effect.

A highly sensitive inline gas pressure sensor based on the hollow core Bragg fiber (HCBF) and harmonic Vernier effect (VE) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. By sandwiching a segment of HCBF between the lead-in single-mode fiber (SMF) and the hollow core fiber (HCF), a cascaded Fabry-Perot interferometer is produced. The lengths of the HCBF and HCF are precisely optimized and controlled to generate the VE, achieving a high sensitivity of the sensor. Meanwhile, a digital signal processing (DSP) algorithm is proposed to research the mechanism of the VE envelope, thus providing an effective way to improve the sensor's dynamic range based on calibrating the order of the dip. Theoretical simulations are investigated and matched well with the experimental results. The proposed sensor exhibits a maximum gas pressure sensitivity of 150.02 nm/MPa with a low temperature cross talk of 0.00235 MPa/ ∘C. All these advantages highlight the sensor's enormous potential for gas pressure monitoring under various extreme conditions.

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.

C-band 120-Gb/s PAM-4 transmissions over a 100-km dispersion-uncompensated SSMF using joint combined pulse shaping and low-complexity nonlinear equalization.

In C-band intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) systems, the frequency-dependent power fading induced by chromatic dispersion (CD) and square-law detection limits the transmission capacity and distance, especially for beyond 100-Gb/s transmissions over a 100-km dispersion-uncompensated link. To reach this goal, we propose a scheme of nonlinear pre-distortion, novel, to the best of our knowledge, combined pulse shaping, and post nonlinear equalization for four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4)-based IM/DD systems. At the transmitter, the nonlinear pre-distortion is used to generate unequally spaced PAM-4 symbols for pre-compensating the nonlinearities. While the novel pulse shaping, simply shaped by the linear combination of two inter-symbol interference (ISI)-free pulses, alters the frequency-domain power distribution of the PAM-4 signal and results in performance improvement. At the receiver, low-complexity post nonlinear equalization using an absolute-term based nonlinear equalizer with weight sharing (AT-NLE-WS) is performed to eliminate CD-induced power fading and residual nonlinear impairments. With the cooperation of these techniques, record 120-Gb/s PAM-4 signals are successfully transmitted over a 100-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) with the measured bit error ratio (BER) below 3.8 × 10-3, achieving >9% improvement of system capacity in comparison with the conventional pulse shaping schemes.

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.