Optical Injection-Locked Directly Modulated Lasers for Dispersion Pre-Compensated Direct-Detection Transmission

The growing traffic demand in interdata center and metro communications requires high-speed and low-cost transceivers that can flexibly adapt to different transmission distances of up to a few hundred km. Ultimately low-cost transceivers will use the simplest optical hardware, namely a directly modulated transmitter and direct detection receiver. Using optical injection-locked directly modulated lasers, we propose a transmitter that can control the full field of the optical signal and achieve error-free transmission over up to 300 km of dispersion uncompensated SMF-28. We demonstrate such a transmission system and discuss its potential for short- and medium-reach communication systems.