Single-channel 1.61 Tb/s Optical Coherent Transmission Enabled by Neural Network-Based Digital Pre-Distortion

We propose a novel digital pre-distortion (DPD) based on neural networks for high-baudrate optical coherent transmitters. We demonstrate experimentally that it outperforms an optimized linear DPD giving a 1.2 dB SNR gain in a 128GBaud PCS-256QAM single-channel transmission over 80km of standard single-mode fiber resulting in a record 1.61 Tb/s net data rate.