Digital dispersion pre-compensation based on intensity modulator and phase modulator for PAM-4 in short-reach fibre communications

摘要

High-speed PAM-4 is a promising way for future low-cost short-reach fibre communications. However, for 1550 nm transmission with the lowest attenuation for standard single-mode fibre (SSMF), the fibre dispersion-induced inter-symbol interference (ISI) becomes non-linear in direct detection. Dispersion pre-compensation at the transmitter side is necessary to avoid such non-linear ISI. Different from previous methods to generate the vector signal from dispersion pre-compensation using IQ modulators, in this study a digital dispersion pre-compensation (DDPC) scheme based on an intensity modulator (IM) plus a phase modulator (PM) is studied. Taking into account the digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) bandwidth limit on the vector signal generation, anti-aliasing filtering on both the magnitude signal and the phase signal should be applied. The error rate performance of the IM-PM based DDPC scheme is analysed in detail using numerical simulations. For 50 Gb/s PAM-4 transmission at 1550 nm over SSMF, over 50 km fibre transmission can be supported if the two DACs have enough bandwidth larger than 17.5 GHz. If the DAC bandwidth is limited to 15 GHz, it is also possible to transmit over 20 km SSMF. Meanwhile, it is verified that practical 5-bit DAC resolution is enough for the IM-PM based DDPC scheme to work for a wide range of SSMF lengths.