Huawei sets transmission record with new modulator

Coherent discourse: Part 1

A paper from Huawei and Sun Yat-Sen University in the January issue of the Optica journal describes a thin-film lithium niobate modulator. The modulator enabled a world-record coherent optical transmission, sending nearly 2 terabits of data over a single wavelength.

Maxim Kuschnerov

Much of the industry’s focus in recent years has been to fit coherent optical technology within a pluggable module.

Such pluggables allow 400-gigabit coherent interfaces to be added to IP routers and switches, serving the needs of the data centre operators and telecom operators.

But research labs of the leading optical transport vendors continue to advance high-end coherent systems beyond 800-gigabit-per-wavelength transmissions.

Optical transport systems from Ciena, Infinera and Huawei can send 800-gigabit wavelengths using a symbol rate of 96-100 gigabaud (GBd).

Acacia Communications, part of Cisco, detailed late last year the first 1.2-terabit single-wavelength coherent pluggable transceiver that will operate at 140GBd, twice the symbol rate of 400-gigabit modules such as 400ZR. 

Now Huawei has demonstrated in the lab a thin-film lithium niobate modulator that supports a symbol rate of 220GBd and beyond.

Maxim Kuschnerov, director of the optical and quantum communications laboratory at Huawei, says the modulator has a 110GHz 3dB bandwidth but that it can be operated at higher frequencies, suggesting a symbol rate as high as 240GBd.

Thin-film lithium niobate modulator

Huawei says research is taking place into new materials besides the established materials of indium phosphide and silicon photonics. “It is a very exciting topic lately,” says Kuschnerov.

He views the demonstrated thin-film lithium niobate optical modulator as disruptive: “It can cover up several deficiencies of today’s modulators.”

Besides the substantial increase in bandwidth - the objective of any new coherent technology - the modulator has performance metrics that benefit the coherent system such as a low driving voltage and low insertion loss.

A driving voltage of a modulator is a key performance parameter. For the modulator, it is sub-1V.

The signal driving the modulator comes from a digital-to-analogue (D/A) converter, part of the coherent digital signal processor (DSP). The D/A output is fed into a modulator driver. “That [driver] requires power, footprint, and increases the complexity of integrating the [modem’s] modules tighter,” says Kuschnerov.

The modulator’s sub-1V drive voltage is sufficiently small that the DSP’s CMOS-based D/A can drive it directly, removing the modulator driver circuit that also has bandwidth performance limitations. The modulator thus reduces the transmitter’s overall cost.

The low-loss modulator also improves the overall optical link budget. And for certain applications, it could even make the difference as to whether optical amplification is needed.

“The modulator checks the box of very high bandwidth,” says Kuschnerov. “And it helps by not having to add a semiconductor optical amplifier for some applications, nor needing a driver amplifier.”

One issue with the thin-film modulator is its relative size. While not large - it has a length of 23.5mm - it is larger than indium phosphide and silicon photonics modulators.

1.96-terabit wavelength

Huawei’s lab set-up used a transmit coherent DSP with D/As operating at 130 Giga-samples-per-second (GS/s) to drive the modulator. The modulation used was a 400-quadrature amplitude modulation (400-QAM) constellation coupled with probabilistic constellation shaping. 

A 10 per cent forward error correction scheme was used such that, overall, 1.96-terabits per second of data was sent using a single wavelength.

The D/A converter was implemented in silicon germanium using high-end lab equipment to generate the signal at 130GS/s.

“This experiment shows how much we still need to go,” says Kuschnerov. “What we have done at 130GBd shows there is a clear limitation with the D/A [compared to the 220GBd modulator].”

Baud-rate benefits

Increasing the baud rate of systems is not the only approach but is the favoured implementation choice.

What customers want is more capacity and reducing the cost per bit for the same power consumption. Increasing the baud rate decreases the cost and power consumption of the optical transceiver.

By doubling the baud rate, an optical transceiver delivers twice the capacity for a given modulation scheme. The cost per bit of the transceiver decreases as does the power consumed per bit. Instead of two transceivers and two sets of components, one transceiver and one set are used instead.

But doubling the baud rate doesn’t improve the optical system’s spectral efficiency since doubling the baud rate doubles the channel width. That said, algorithmic enhancements are added to each new generation of coherent modem but technically, the spectral efficiency practically no longer improves.

Huawei acknowledges that while the modulator promises many benefits, all the coherent modem’s components - the coherent ASIC, the D/A and analogue-to-digital (D/A) converters, the optics, and the analogue circuitry - must equally scale. This represents a significant challenge.

Kuschnerov says optical research is finding disruptive answers but scaling performance, especially on the electrical side, remains a critical issue. “How do you increase the D/A sampling rates to match these kinds of modulator technologies?” he says. “It is not straightforward.”

The same is true for the other electrical components: the driver technologies and the trans-impedance amplifier circuits at the receiver.

Another issue is combining the electrical and optical components into a working system. Doubling the signalling of today’s optical systems is a huge radio frequency design and packaging challenge.

But the industry consensus is that with newer CMOS processes and development in components and materials, doubling the symbol rate again to 240GB will be possible.

But companies don’t know - at least they are not saying - what the upper symbol rate limit will be. The consensus is that increasing the baud rate will end. Then, other approaches will be pursued.

Kuschnerov notes that if a 1.6-terabit transceiver could be implemented using a single wavelength or with eight 200Gbps ones with the same spectral performance, cost, footprint and power consumption, end users wouldn’t care which of the two were used.

However, does optics enable such greater parallelism?

Kuschnerov says that while decades of investment has gone into silicon photonics, it is still not there yet.

“It doesn’t have the cost-effectiveness at 16, 32 or 64 lanes because the yield goes down significantly,” he says. “We as an industry can’t do it yet.”

He is confident that, soon enough, the industry will figure out how to scale the optics: “With each generation, we are getting better at it.”

Coherent engineers will then have more design options to meet the system objectives.

And just like with microprocessors, it will no longer be upping the clock frequency but rather adopting parallel processing i.e. multiple cores. Except, in this case, it will be parallel coherent optics.