Optical Injection-Locked Directly-Modulated Lasers for Dispersion Pre-compensated Direct-Detection Transmission

• Main Authors: Liu, Z, Hesketh, G, Kelly, B, O’Carroll, J, Phelan, R, Richardson, D, Slavik, R
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2018
• Subjects: Optical transmitters; directly modulated laser; digital signal processing; Data center interconnection; metro networks; optical injection locking; pulse amplitude modulation (PAM); DML
• Online Access: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10054623/7/Liu_08444650.pdf; https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10054623/

The growing traffic demand in inter-data center and metro communications requires high-speed and low-cost transceivers that can flexibly adapt to different transmission distances of up to a few hundred km. Ultimately low-cost transceivers will use the simplest optical hardware: namely a directly-modulated transmitter and direct detection receiver. Using optical injection-locked directly-modulated lasers (OIL-DML), we propose a transmitter that can control the full field of the optical signal and achieve error-free transmission over up to 300 km of dispersion uncompensated SMF-28. We demonstrate such a transmission system and discuss its potential for short and medium reach communication systems.