Experimental Demonstration of 600 Gb/s Net Rate PAM4 Transmissions Over 2 km and 10 km With a 4-λ CWDM TOSA

We propose to introduce a controlled amount of inter-symbol interference (ISI) during pulse shaping in a high symbol rate intensity modulation direct detection (IM/DD) system to increase the alternating current (AC) power of the received electrical signal after photo-detection and transimpedance amplification. We experimentally demonstrate high-speed 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) transmissions with a 4-λ coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) transmitter optical sub-assembly (TOSA) using the proposed scheme. The intentionally introduced ISI is mitigated using either transmitter-side Tomlinson Harashima precoding (THP) or receiver-side feed forward equalization (FFE) aided with a 2-tap post filter and maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE). Both methods enable 4 × 81 Gbaud PAM4 transmission over 2 km of single mode fiber (SMF), with a bit error rate (BER) below the 7% overhead hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold of 3.8 × 10 −3 , which corresponds to a net rate of >600 Gb/s. We also explore the limit of our system at 10 km. The result shows that an aggregated net rate of 600 Gb/s excluding the HD-FEC overhead can still be achieved by loading different symbol rates onto different wavelength channels.