Low-latency 100 Gb/s PAM-4 PON with a 42.5 dB power budget over the 20 km anti-resonant hollow-core fiber
Hui Chen, Lei Zhang, Xu Zhang, Qibing Wang, Chao Li, Siyue Jin, Xumeng Liu, Zichen Liu, Honglin Ji, Zhaopeng Xu, Jie Luo, Lei Wang, Junwen Zhang, Zhixue He, Nan Chi, Shaohua Yu
Abstract
The surging growth in data traffic has necessitated the development of higher-speed, lower-latency intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) passive optical networks (PONs) with higher power budgets. To address the inherent limitations of traditional silica-based solid-core fibers, anti-resonant hollow-core fibers have garnered significant attention from both academia and industry. In this Letter, we present an experimental demonstration of 100 Gb/s PAM-4 IM/DD PON transmission over a 20 km anti-resonant hollow-core fiber in the C band, utilizing low-complexity digital signal processing (DSP). The result achieves a record high power budget of 42.5 dB, facilitated by a 3-tap weighted lookup table (LUT) at the optical line terminal (OLT) side and a semiconductor optical amplifier used as a preamplifier at the optical network unit (ONU) side. This represents the highest power budget reported for IM/DD PON to date, to the best of our knowledge, and offers a promising alternative for the future evolution of PON systems.