Silicon Photonics (SiPh) is expected to be the technology platform to address next-generation optical interconnect solutions. By leveraging existing semiconductor production infrastructure and processes as well as building complex optical system-on-chip solutions by shrinking photonics and co-designing with electronics, SiPh enables opportunities for a wide range of fundamentally new applications.

We investigate a realistic integrated multicore system consisting of directly spliced components: homogeneous trenchassisted seven-core fiber with a length of 60 km, cladding-pumped seven-core amplifiers, integrated seven-core isolators, and fiberized fan-in/fan-out couplers. We analyze the performance of an in-line repeatered multicore transmission system in a recirculating loop by transmitting a 200 Gbits 16-QAM test channel and 14 x 100 Gbits QPSK neighboring channels between the wavelengths of 1558.58 and 1564.27 nm in a 50-GHz grid. For every position of the test channel within the considered band we demonstrate transmission distances over 720 km.

Multicore fiber (MCF) transmission is considered as one of the promising technologies for breaking the capacity limit of traditional single mode fibers. Managing the crosstalk (XT) and configuring optical paths adaptively based on the XT as well as achieving longer distance and larger capacity transmission are important, because intercore XT could be the main limiting factor for MCF transmission. In a real MCF network, the intercore XT in a particular core is likely to change continuously as the optical paths in the adjacent cores are dynamically assigned to match the dynamic nature of the data traffic. If we configure the optical paths while ignoring the intercore XT value, the Q-factors may become excessive. Therefore, monitoring the intercore XT value continuously and configuring optical path parameters adaptively and flexibly are essential. To address these challenges, we develop an MCF transport network testbed and demonstrate an XT-aware traffic engineering scenario. With the help of a software-defined network controller, the modulation format and optical path route are adaptively changed based on the monitored XT values by using programmable devices such as a real-time transponder and a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer.

We demonstrate an all-silicon-photonic coherent link, including a hybrid tunable laser with <100kHz linewidth, >45dB SMSR, and <-135dB/Hz RIN as light source for a BGA-packaged 64Gbaud coherent transceiver with direct edge-coupling to 10 mu m-MFD fiber. (C) 2018 The Authors(s)

We report on the results of a field trial carried out on a Telecom Italia metro link, targeting short data center interconnect applications. The test-bed presented realistic transmission conditions, such as an average similar to 0.3-dB/km attenuation and usage of legacy erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) only. We transmitted a net bit rate of 400 Gb/s on a single carrier with 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 128QAM over 156 km. Error-free transmission over 80 km for single carrier dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) 30 x 400G 64QAM and 30 x 400G 128QAM (one half of the C-band) is reported. The net spectral efficiency, for both schemes, is 7.11 b/s/Hz.

A complete, realistic integrated system is investigated, consisting of directly spliced 7-core MCF, cladding-pumped 7-core amplifiers, isolators, and couplers. The system is demonstrated in a 16QAM C-band WDM scenario over 720 km.

We present a high-core-count 32-core multicore erbium/ytterbium-doped fiber amplifier (32c-MC-EYDFA) in a cladding pumped configuration. A side pumping technique is employed for ease of pump coupling in this monolithic all-fiber amplifier. A minimum gain of >17 dB and an average noise figure (NF) of 6.5 dB is obtained over all cores in the wavelength range 1534 nm-1561 nm for −4 dBm input signal power. The core-to-core variation for both amplifier gain and NF is measured to be 1850 km was successfully demonstrated. We also compare the total power consumption of our MC-EYDFAs with that of 32 conventional single core erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) to illustrate the potential power saving benefits.

We demonstrate the first crosstalk-aware traffic engineering as a use case in a multicore fibre transport network. With the help of a software-defined network controller, modulation format and channel route are adaptively changed using programmable devices with XT monitors.

We demonstrate the first 1-Pb/s unidirectional inline-amplified transmission over 205.6-km of single-mode 32-core fiber within C-band only. 96-Gbaud LDPC-coded PDM-16QAM channels with FEC redundancy of 12.75% realize high-aggregate spectral efficiency of 217.6 b/s/Hz.

We analyse the crosstalk performance of a fully integrated inline amplified 32-core link for 100G QPSK, 150G 8QAM, 200G 16-QAM, and 250G 32QAM in a recirculating loop. Transmission distances over 1000 km are confirmed for 8-QAM and QPSK channels.

In this paper, a simulation model of a multicore fiber in the linear regime is presented. We describe how to digitally represent the fiber and introduce a modelling scheme based on Coupled-Mode theory and Power-Coupled theory to analyze the system performance of multicore fibers. In order to validate the investigated model, the obtained simulation results are compared to our own measurements of a 7-core multicore fiber transmission link and to results from previously published experiments.

A 10.5-Tb/s optical transmission (15 × 100 Gb/s QPSK channels per core) over 2520 km of multicore fiber is achieved using an integrated multicore transmission link consisting of directly spliced multicore components, such as fan-in/fan-out fiber couplers, a 60-km trench-assisted seven-core hexagonal fiber and cladding-pumped erbium-ytterbium-doped fiber amplifiers.

A transmitted distance of 180 km over an integrated multicore link is demonstrated for a C-band 32-QAM WDM system, where the complete usable amplification region of the integrated 7-core amplifiers, supporting 50 channels per core, is exploited.

A 10.5 Tbit/s optical transmission (15 x 100 Gbit/s QPSK channels per core) over 2,520 km of multicore fiber is achieved using an integrated multicore transmission link consisting of directly spliced multicore components such as fan-in/fanout fiber couplers, a 60 km trench-assisted 7-core hexagonal fiber and cladding-pumped erbium-ytterbium-doped fiber amplifiers.

The operation of multidomain and multivendor EONs can be achieved by interoperable sliceable bandwidth variable transponders (S-BVTs), a GMPLS/BGP-LS-based control plane, and a planning tool. The control plane is extended to include the control of S-BVTs and elastic cross connects, which combine a large port-count fiber-switch (optical backplane) and bandwidth-variable wavelength-selective switches, enabling the end-to-end provisioning and recovery of network services. A multipartner testbed is built to demonstrate and validate the proposed end-to-end architecture. Interoperability among S-BVTs is experimentally tested between different implementations. In this case, transponders are configured using the proposed control plane. The achieved performance with hard-decision and soft-decision FECs using only the information distributed by the control plane is measured against the performance of the single-vendor implementation, where proprietary information is used, demonstrating error-free transmission up to 300 km.

Novel digital subcarrier multiplexed (SCM) hybrid QAM scheme is proposed, demonstrating flexibility in data-rate and tolerance to optical filtering effects. SCM hybrid 150Gb/s signals show ~60% reach improvement in cascaded 37.5GHz ROADM filtering scenario.