Quadrature Duobinary for 100G Optical Networks
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: Over the past two decades, photonic technologies have revolutionized long-distance communications, producing tectonic changes in the way people communicate, gather information, and conduct business. The revolutionary advancements in optical communications, coupled with parallel progress in computing and data networking, have had major impacts on human productivity, scientific progress, and global economic development. Indeed, data communications and networking has become an important sector for the CA economy. The demand of society for data communications capacity continues to grow exponentially, driven by new bandwidth hungry Internet applications, such as video-on-demand, file sharing, and telepresence. The core or backbone of the Internet depends on ultra-high capacity fiber optic networks. Fiber optic capacity must double every two years just to keep up with society’s demand for bandwidth. The key parameter for driving fiber optic communications forward is spectral efficiency. Thus, one of the major aims of this proposed project is to enable a doubling of spectral efficiency. While scaling to ever higher spectral efficiency, future optical networks must also support higher per-channel bit rates to keep up with advances in high-speed data networking interfaces. The next challenge is to enable 100G Ethernet by jumping from 40 Gb/s to 100 Gb/s per channel. The future network architecture will also require enhancements in optical networking functionality to enable dynamic mesh optical networking. This research project is designed to specifically address the future needs of optical networks by providing a novel solution for efficient 100G transport tailored to flexible mesh optical networks. The Industry Sponsor of this project, Infinera Corp., is a successful and growing manufacturer of high capacity fiber optic communications equipment, providing hundreds of high-tech jobs for the CA economy. Realizing that innovation is the key for gaining a competitive advantage, Infinera invests significantly in research and development. This industry-university collaboration creates a fresh and creative view on many challenging and complex problems facing Infinera engineers, and thus strengthen Infinera’s competitive advantage over foreign rivals. The proposed project aims to address a critical technical question for Infinera: what is the optimum optical modulation and detection technique to enable high spectral efficiency 100G transmission? The correct choice can accelerate Infinera’s development of 100G optical networking equipment, creating new high-tech jobs in CA. The wrong choice could significantly delay development or even result in lost market share to foreign rivals. The PI’s proposed bandwidth efficient optical quadrature duobinary concept, if successfully demonstrated during the course of the project, may provide an innovative solution to several challenging problems involved in 100G fiber optic transmission.