Researchers at Siemens, working in cooperation with Micram, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications (Heinrich-Hertz-Institut) and Eindhoven Technical University, achieved an optical transmission rate of 107 Gbps over a single fiber channel using purely electric processing in both the transmitter and receiver.
The newly developed transmission and receiving system processes the data by purely electrical means directly before and after its conversion into optical signals. The test was conducted at a long-haul network at one of world’s largest optical network operators, in which Siemens has previously deployed a 40 Gbps network for commercial use.
A few months earlier, Siemens researchers already proved the feasibility of a receiver with 100% electrical processing for optical transmission at 107 Gbps in which the signal from the photo diode is picked up and processed directly by a chip. The optical transmitter has been “fully electrified.”
“In the spring of 2006 we demonstrated the system with a fully electric receiver,” said Dr. Rainer H. Derksen, project coordinator at Siemens Corporate Technology in Munich. “At that time we were still using optical multiplexing in the transmitter. Now we’ve designed a complete system with 100% electrical processing of the data in both the receiver and the transmitter.”
Siemens said the first commercial products based on the prototype will be available on the market within a few years. The company expects the technology will find deployments in 100 Gbps Ethernet systems.
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