The soaring demand for higher speeds in datacenters to address the relentless growth of the global IP traffic places optical interconnects in the spotlight. In this manuscript, the authors present a high-speed optical transceiver for intra-datacenter connectivity. The transceiver is based on single-mode, single-polarization high-speed vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), a VCSEL driver chip, and a linear receiver. Following a step-by-step approach, the authors present the architectures, assembly processes, and experimental results from the different modules. More specifically, they demonstrate a data transmission experiment at 80 Gb/s using PAM-4 (four-level Pulse Amplitude Modulation) modulation for a reach of up to 500 m by employing a single-mode VCSEL module, and a full-link experiment proving up to 64 Gb/s per lane capacity using PAM-4 signaling of the VCSEL-based optical transceiver test vehicles in back-to-back configuration and up to 56 Gb/s for 500 m and 2 km transmission distances. The acquired experimental results verify the suitability of the optical transceiver for intra-datacenter interconnects’ applications.
The publication is written by Kanakis, Iliadis, Soenen, Moeneclaey, Argyris, Kalavrouziotis, Spiga, Bakopoulos and Avramopoulos.
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