Many us had high hope that during OFC we are going to see latest research to help guide us on our SMF PMD selection. The last day of the conference I came to the realization that most of SMF PMD related material I have already seen in IEEE 802.3bs, in some cases we have actually seen more recent update than what was submitted back in Oct for OFC regular conference papers.
OFC does offer a venue for anyone to publish their latest and greatest work as post-deadline paper, the bar to get paper accepted in post-deadline is very high. Notably 3 paper were published in post deadline related to our SMF PMDs:
o. The most significant was a paper by M. Mazzini et. at. from Cisco
"25GBaud PAM-4 Error Free Transmission over both Single Mode Fiber and Multimode Fiber in a QSFP form factor based on Silicon Photonics"
Demonstrating feasibility of the 10 km 43 Gb/s PAM4 and 51.3 Gb/s PAM4 back to back, they also showed error operation over 100 m of OM3 fiber.
o. The next most significant paper was Y. Matsui et. al. from Finsiar
"112-Gb/s WDM link using two Directly Modulated Al-MQW BH DFB Lasers at 56 Gb/s"
Showing feasibility of 2x50G NRZ or PAM4 for operation over 10 km
o. Another related paper was by P. Dong et. al. from ALU
"Four-Channel 100-Gb/s per Channel Discrete Multi-Tone Modulation Using Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits"
Showed feasibility of DMT over 4 km link operating at ~58 Gb/s with our assumed KP4 pre-FEC rate of 2.5E-4 and 100 Gb/s if one assumes pre-FEC BER of 3e-2.
