ADCs key for high baud-rate coherent systems
Friday, July 29, 2022 at 4:34PM Increasing the baud rate of coherent modems benefits optical transport. The higher the baud rate the more data can be sent on a wavelength, reducing the cost-per-bit of traffic.
But engineers have become so good at designing coherent systems that they are now approaching the Shannon limit.
Tomislav Drenski
At the OFC show earlier this year, Ciena showcased a coherent module operating at 107 gigabaud (GBd). And last year, Acacia, now part of Cisco, announced its next-generation 1.2 terabits-per-second (Tbps) wavelength coherent module operating at up to 140GBd.
The industry believes that increasing the baud rate to 240+GBd is possible, but each new symbol-rate hike is challenging.
All the components in a modem - the coherent DSP and its digital-to-analogue (DAC) and analogue-to-digital (ADC) converters, the optics, and the analogue drive circuitry - must scale in lockstep.
