400-Gb/s DMT-SDM Transmission Based on Membrane DML-Array-on-Silicon

We report on space-division multiplexing (SDM) transmissions of up to 400 Gb/s over a homogeneous four-core fiber using discrete multitone (DMT) modulation for intra-datacenter applications and 200/400 GbE links. The transmission system is enabled by a compact, SDM-channel scalable, multi-core fiber (MCF) pluggable, and energy-efficient SDM transmitter composed of a 4-channel 1.3-μm membrane directly modulated laser (DML) array-on-silicon integrated with a fiber-bundle type fan-in with loss of less than 1 dB and negligible optical and electrical crosstalk (XT). By simultaneously modulating all four lasers, 200-Gb/s (50-Gb/s/channel) and 400-Gb/s (100-Gb/s/channel) are achieved over a 425-m MCF link for KP4 and soft-decision forward error correction, respectively, with a power reduction of ~6× compared with conventional DML transmitters. Additionally, numerical simulations based on a detailed rate-equations model predict the feasibility of the system for MCF transmissions up to 10 km even with moderate levels of XT.