Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits for Soliton Based Long Haul Optical Communication

Abstract

We demonstrate a silicon photonic transmitter for soliton-based communications enabling the interleaving of QPSK and APSK modulated soliton pulses overlapping in both the time and frequency domains. The nonlinear Fourier transform is used to both determine adequate soliton launch conditions and facilitate nonlinear equalization at the receiver. A spectral efficiency of 0.5 b/s/Hz per polarization is reached over a 5400 km transmission distance and constitutes, to the best of our knowledge, a record for soliton transmission over such long distances. Linear and nonlinear minimum mean square error and artificial neural network-based equalizers are also experimentally benchmarked, with artificial neural networks resulting in particularly effective equalization in this system.

Scalable orthogonal delay-division multiplexed OEO artificial neural network trained for TI-ADC equalization

“…Digital electronic ANNs have already been successfully applied to such nonlinear equalization tasks in both short reach fiber links 51 and long haul communications. 52 In this study, we apply nonlinear equalization to the output of the optically enabled (OE), time-interleaved (TI-)ADC architecture shown in Fig. 9(b), for which we have previously benchmarked linear feed-forward equalization (FFE) with digital electronics.…”

Packaging of micro-lens arrays to photonic integrated circuits using beam shape evaluation

“…Photonic packaging is a critical aspect of the photonic ecosystem following on from a rapid growth of Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) based technologies. There exist numerous highly innovative PIC-based solutions for a wide range of applications and markets such as sensors [1,2], telecoms [3,4], bio-medical [5][6][7] and LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) [8]. However, as chips become more complicated, there are assembly and packaging bottlenecks that impede the commercialization of the full systems.…”