300 Gbps Short-Reach C-Band Optical Links

Exchange of information in fast, reliable and secure way with access anywhere is a must for a modern society. This leads to emerging traffic in Data Centers imposing tight requirements for short-reach optical links [1]. Research activities around next generation GbE interfaces requires wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) for short-reach optical links. Therefore C-band for intensity modulation direct detection (IMDD) short-reach optical communications is even more attractive [2]. In this talk we review experimental intensity modulation and direct detection demonstrations for short reach optical links. Furthermore, we evaluate 330-Gbps line rate with 128 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) discrete multitone (DMT) [3] and 300 Gbps line rate with 100 Gbaud 8-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM8) [4] IMDD transmission after 400 meters below pre-forward error correction (FEC) bit error rate (BER) with a single packaged externally modulated laser (EML), a DAC and a packaged InP photo-detector (PD) in C-band [5].