Single Sideband Transmission Employing a 1-to-4 ADC Frontend and Parallel Digitization

Distributed data-centers have emerged as a key architecture for future optical networks. This architecture relies on power and cost-efficient high-speed fiber optical connections over distances up to 80 km which can be densely wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) in the C-band. Recently, single-polarization single sideband (SSB) direct detection (DD) has been considered as an attractive transmission scheme for achieving data rates beyond 100 Gb/s per channel over 80 km. The advantages of SSB DD transmission includes the simple transceiver architecture and the capability of electronic dispersion compensation. However, the required digitizer's bandwidth in a single-polarization SSB transmission is around four times higher than in those of a conventional dual-polarization coherent detection system offering the same data rate. This critical issue prevents the practical implementation of high-speed SSB digital signal processing (DSP) in CMOS ASIC. To address this problem, we consider in this work a 112 GSa/s SiGe HBT BiCMOS ADC frontend. Using this ADC front-end, we experimentally demonstrate a WDM SSB DD transmission at a net data rate of 200 Gb/s per channel over 80 km while using only 14 GHz of digitizer's bandwidth which is comparable to those of a full-coherent counterpart.