High-Speed DMT and VCSEL-Based MMF Transmission Using Pre-Distortion

We present high-speed single-channel discrete multitone (DMT) operations of directly modulated 850-nm vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL). Successful transmission of 135 Gb/s over 10 m of OM4 multi-mode fiber (MMF) and 114 Gb/s over 550 m is demonstrated below the 7 % overhead hard-decision forward error correction (FEC) bit error rate (BER) limit. At higher BER limits, i.e. 20 % overhead soft-decision FEC, which are of arising interest for these high-speed short-range links, data rates of up to 161 Gb/s are presented. This is enabled by high-bandwidth low-noise VCSEL, which operate in quasi-single mode to overcome the mode dispersion limitations of the MMF. The applied modulation format is DMT in combination with a Volterra-filter-based pre-distortion approach, which pre-compensates the linear and nonlinear behavior of the transmission system, primarily the digital-analog converter, the VCSEL, the MMF, and the photoreceiver. Furthermore, a detailed investigation of the pre-distortion is given by experimental means, showing that the optimum amount of pre-distortion depends on the applied components and the signal bandwidth. This makes it challenging to predict the optimum; however, a pure electrical pre-distortion offers already a fair gain in performance.