Performance Investigation of Multicore Optical Interconnects for Data Centers

Abstract

Recently, there is increasing interest in the design of high-capacity data center optical interconnects (OICs) for data centers using space-division multiplexing (SDM) technique. This paper presents design concepts and performance evaluation of multicore fiber (MCF)-based OIC suitable for 50 THz data transmission. The OIC is designed with 7 cores, 24 wave length-division multiplexed (WDM) channels, and 320 Gbps dual-polarization (DP) 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signaling per channel. Simulation results reveal that the OIC can support 10 km transmission when the intercore crosstalk level is less than - 18.5 dB. The simulation results are obtained using VPIphotonics software and can be used as a guideline to design higher data rate SDM-OICs.