• A Hybrid Conference – In-Person and Virtual Presentations
  • Technical Conference:  24 – 28 March 2024
  • Exhibition: 26 – 28 March 2024
  • San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, California, USA

Short Courses

SC203 - 400, 800Gb/s and Beyond Optical Communications Systems: Design and Design Trade-offs

Sunday, 24 March
08:30 - 12:30 (Pacific Time (US & Canada), UTC - 08:00)

Short Course Level: Advanced Beginner

Instructor:

Ezra Ip, NEC Labs, USA
Chongjin Xie, Alibaba Group, USA

Short Course Description:

The increasing demand for data and video-intensive content and the adoption of cloud services are driving needs for ever increasing capacity in service provider’s backbone and metro networks while also creating needs for high speed interconnect of hyper-scale data centers. To satisfy the growth in demand for bandwidth, communication and content service providers are deploying 100Gb/s and 200Gb/s throughout their networks today, and are increasingly planning to deploy even higher speeds, e.g. 400Gb/s and beyond, on shorter high capacity links. We are also seeing a trend toward flex-rate systems where transmission speeds and capacity can be optimized for a given fiber distance.

The first part of this course provides an overview of the drivers and applications of 400Gb/s and beyond optical systems in data center and service provider networks. It describes the requirements and expectations network operators will have on cost, power consumption, footprint, reliability, optical performance, and interoperability. We present practical design issues of 400Gb/s systems in long-haul, metro and data center networks, and we critically review the availability and performance of the key building blocks. In particular, we discuss the technologies needed to implement different modulation formats, and the corresponding trade-off between complexity/cost of different implementations and the achievable fiber transmission distance. We also look at future bit rates and technologies beyond 400Gb/s, including super-channel, flex-rate, and highly parallel short reach systems.

Short Course Benefits:

This course should enable you to:

  • Identify key requirements and drivers for 400Gb/s applications

  • Understand key building blocks of coherent systems

  • Understand digital signal processing algorithms in coherent systems

  • Discuss non-coherent alternative solutions in short-reach systems

  • Describe the availability and performance of 400Gb/s.

  • Discuss 400Gb/s transmission limitations

  • Understand 400Gb/s data center networks

  • Summarize 400Gb/s standards activities

  • Describe drivers and technologies for systems beyond 400Gb/s

Short Course Audience:

The course is intended for engineers and technical managers who want an up-to-date overview of 400Gb/s and beyond optical communications systems, including technologies, applications in different networks, and design trade-offs. The course requires some understanding of basic optical transmission systems.

Instructor Biography:

Chongjin Xie is a senior director at Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group, responsible for Alibaba data center optics technologies. Before Alibaba, he was a DMTS at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, doing research on optical communication systems and networks. He did his postdoctoral research at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden from 1999 to 2001, and received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications in 1996 and 1999, respectively.

Ezra Ip is a Senior Staff Member at NEC Laboratories America, and his research interests spans from coherent optical transmission systems, digital signal processing techniques, space division multiplexing systems, optical fiber sensing. He received his B.E. (Hons) degree from the University of Canterbury in 2002, and M.S. Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 2004 and 2008, respectively.