Coherent Optical Transceivers Scaling and Integration Challenges

Abstract

The advancement of digital coherent technologies has dramatically increased the system capacity per single-core single-mode fiber to the point that we can now approach the Shannon limit by utilizing high-order modulation formats and high-coding gain forward error correction (FEC) codes. Because the required energy per bit increases exponentially the closer we get to the Shannon limit, extending the available optical bandwidth by using ultrawideband wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and/or spatial-division multiplexing (SDM) is indispensable for increasing the system capacity with high energy efficiency. However, simple extensions of wavelength resources and spatial parallelization dramatically increase the number of transceivers (TxRxs) in proportion to the wavelength/spatial multiplicity. The key to achieving cost- and energy-efficient systems is to reduce the system complexity by using high-density integration and broadband optelectronics. In this article, we overview and discuss the recent advances of coherent optical transceivers integrated with an optical front end and digital signal processing (DSP)/application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). We then present the transponder architectures and the challenges involved in applying them for massive parallelized transmission systems.