Beyond 600 Gbps optical interconnect utilizing wavelength division multiplexed visible light laser communication [Invited]
Yingjun Zhou, Xianhao Lin, Zengyi Xu, Zhilan Lü, Yiqi Huang, Zhiteng Luo, Haoyu Zhang, Leihao Sun, Jane J. Ye, Hui Chen, Zhixue He, Jiali Li, Junwen Zhang, Chao Shen, Shaohua Yu, Nan Chi
Abstract
The rapid growth of new services has led to a significant increase in data traffic, which brings challenges for data centers in supporting high-speed processing of large volumes of data.Traditional electrical interconnects are becoming increasingly inadequate, leading to increasing attention to optical interconnects to achieve high-speed data center interconnects (DCIs).Visible light laser communication (VLLC) inherits the advantages of free-space optics (FSO), allowing it to circumvent the limitations of conventional fiber-based optical interconnects.In addition, VLLC offers other advantages such as high thermal stability, low power consumption, and low packaging cost.In this Letter, a novel differential pilot coding (DPC) scheme is proposed to achieve precise channel estimation and compensation for linear impairments without halving the effective data rate.A data rate of 601.46 Gbps with a constellation size up to 1024QAM over a 1 m multimode fiber (MMF)-1 m FSO-1 m MMF link is successfully achieved based on a 50-channel wavelength division multiplexer (WDM) VLLC system utilizing DPC and bit-power-loading discrete multitone (DMT) modulation.To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest data rate and constellation size ever the reported for a WDM VLLC system, which proves that VLLC is a promising candidate solution for achieving high-capacity and cost-effective optical interconnects in data centers.