PIC-based 500 Gbps coherent modem thwarts real-time PMD

Sept. 17, 2012

Sunnyvale, CA--Infinera and Verizon report record-breaking PMD performance using a photonic-integrated-circuit (PIC)-based 500 Gbps coherent communications system.

Gail Overton

A diagram shows a coherent communications system, which Infinera and Verizon have shown can easily thwart polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) issues when properly designed.

Sunnyvale, CA--Optical communications systems company Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) released a paper in the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology and Verizon report a record-breaking achievement for real-time polarization mode dispersion (PMD) performance using Infinera's coherent optical transmission system based on 500 Gigabit per second (Gbps or Gb/s) photonic integrated circuits (PICs).

By surmounting the problems of PMD, the companies say that coherent transmission promises to enable higher communication rates without penalty from this common fiber impairment. In the paper, Infinera and Verizon report on the real-time PMD tolerance measurement results of Infinera's coherent transmission technology. Taking advantage of the advanced signal processing built into the modem, performance was analyzed for both first-order and second-order PMD. Moreover, the combination of high amounts of PMD and fast polarization transients were tracked with what Infinera says was near-perfect precision.

"Our team, with Verizon, was able to demonstrate a coherent optical transmission that can handle large PMD values with our commercially available 500 Gb/s PIC," said Dave Welch, Infinera co-founder, executive VP, and chief strategy officer. "System vendors in the industry today are having a difficult time achieving this. Not all coherent systems are the same. This paper illustrates the robustness of our optical solution and is a tribute to our brilliant teams here in Sunnyvale and in our Ottawa Design Center, developing the algorithms to make this possible."

SOURCE: Infinera; www.infinera.com/j7/servlet/NewsItem?newsItemID=317

About the Author

Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)

Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.