TO-56-can packaged colorless WRC-FPLD for QAM OFDM transmission at 42 Gbit/s over 25-km SMF

The weak-resonant-cavity Fabry-Perot laser diode (WRC-FPLD) with colorless and channelized mode features is a new-class optical transmitter fulfilling the need of next-generation communications. By packaging the colorless WRC-FPLD transmitter with a 10-GHz transistor-outline-56-can (TO-56-can), the premier demonstration on directly modulated 42-Gbit/s/channel quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission is demonstrated via wavelength injection-locking. Enlarging the injection level effectively up-shifts the relaxation oscillation peak and suppresses the relative intensity noise, which facilitates the TO-56-can packaged WRC-FPLD to improve its modulation throughput bandwidth to 9 GHz and enhance its signal-to-noise ratio to 22 dB. By pre-amplifying the directly modulated QAM-OFDM data with a total raw bit rate of 42 Gbit/s, the receiving bit-error-rate (BER) under back-to-back transmission can be reduced below the forward-error-correction (FEC) limited BER of 3.8 × 10(-3). Such a colorless WRC-FPLD enables the QAM-OFDM transmission over a 25-km long single-mode-fiber based metropolitan access network with its BER matching the FEC criterion at a receiving power of -2 dBm.