World’s First Standard Cladding Diameter 19-core Optical Fiber with Record Transmission Capacity

Omschrijving

A group of researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, Japan) and Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. (SEI, Japan) in collaboration with the Eindhoven University of Technology, University of L’Aquila, and Macquarie University has developed a 19-core optical fiber with a standard cladding diameter (0.125 mm), which has the largest number of cores among the standard cladding diameter multi-core fibers, and has demonstrated large-capacity transmission at a data-rate of 1.7 petabits per second over a distance of 63.5 km. A randomly coupled multi-core fiber design was used to achieve high core density, as well as a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) digital signal processing to eliminate inter-core signal interference. 

In this experiment, the world record was achieved for the transmission capacity of an optical fiber with a standard cladding diameter, and the world's longest transmission distance was achieved among transmission experiments with a capacity of 1 petabit per second or more. This result shows the possibility of significantly reducing the power consumption of MIMO digital signal processing in transoceanic systems, compared to multi-mode fiber transmission. This fiber technology will contribute to the realization of future long-distance and large-capacity optical communication networks. 

The results of this experiment were accepted as a post-deadline paper presentation at the 46th Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC 2023) and presented on Thursday, March 9, 2023.