High isolation, low inter-channel interference, eight-channel LAN-WDM SiPh transceiver for reliable Tbps transmission

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) inference, training, and cloud computing has driven the continuous demands for data transmission bandwidth and rate, enlarging the modern data centers' scale and quantities. While high-speed, long-reach (LR) (∼10 km) data center interconnection (DCI) faces significant performance degradation caused by device nonlinearity, optical link loss, channel interference, etc., when adopting a wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) architecture. This work establishes an 8-channel multiplexer (MUX)/demultiplexer (DeMUX)-based optoelectronic transceiver scheme with high isolation, low inter-channel interference, and polarization-insensitive features to minimize the four-wave mixing (FWM) interference for Tbps DCI reliable transmission. What we believe to be a novel scheme is applied to an elaborately designed 8-channel intensity modulation direct detection (IM-DD) silicon photonic (SiPh) transceiver system for the LR8 Tbps DCI-Campus (∼10 km transmission) scenario. Experimental results demonstrate the significant performance promotion by 200 Gbps with a total 1.1 Tbps transmission rate, ultra-high channel isolation (>45 dB), thorough polarization-insensitive inter-channel interference suppression, high signal-noise ratio (SNR), as well as good channel response uniformity.