Parallel wavelength-division-multiplexed signal transmission and dispersion compensation enabled by soliton microcombs and microrings

作者：Yuanbin Liu, Hongyi Zhang, Jiacheng Liu, Liangjun Lu, Jiangbing Du, Yu Li, Zuyuan He, Jianping Chen, Linjie Zhou, Andrew W. Poon · 发表于：Nature Communications · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1038/s41467-024-47904-2 · 被引用次数：57 · 研究领域：Advanced Fiber Laser Technologies、Photonic and Optical Devices、Optical Network Technologies

The proliferation of computation-intensive technologies has led to a significant rise in the number of datacenters, posing challenges for high-speed and power-efficient datacenter interconnects (DCIs). Although inter-DCIs based on intensity modulation and direct detection (IM-DD) along with wavelength-division multiplexing technologies exhibit power-efficient and large-capacity properties, the requirement of multiple laser sources leads to high costs and limited scalability, and the chromatic dispersion (CD) restricts the transmission length of optical signals. Here we propose a scalable on-chip parallel IM-DD data transmission system enabled by a single-soliton Kerr microcomb and a reconfigurable microring resonator-based CD compensator. We experimentally demonstrate an aggregate line rate of 1.68 Tbit/s over a 20-km-long SMF. The extrapolated energy consumption for CD compensation of 40-km-SMFs is ~0.3 pJ/bit, which is calculated as being around 6 times less than that of the commercial 400G-ZR coherent transceivers. Our approach holds significant promise for achieving data rates exceeding 10 terabits.