SC203 40/100 Gb/s Transmission Systems, Design and Design Trade-offs

Sunday, March 21, 2010
1:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m.
Martin Birk¹, Benny Mikkelsen²; ¹AT&T Labs, Res., USA, ²Acacia Communications, USA
Level: Advanced Beginner (basic understanding of topic is necessary to follow course material)


Course Description

Commercial mass deployments of 40G have primarily happened in service provider's backbone networks. However, it is expected that 40G deployments will soon move into regional and metro networks imposing a different set of system and cost requirements than backbone applications. At the same time, carriers are already preparing for 100G transport in their backbone networks. This course will cover both 40G metro-regional networks as well as emerging 100G backbone applications.

The first part of this course provides an overview of the drivers and applications of 40G transmission systems in Regional and Metro networks. It describes the requirements and expectations carriers will have to cost, power consumption, footprint, reliability, optical performance and interoperability of 40G systems. In the second part, we discuss emerging 100G backbone applications and technologies. In both parts, we present practical design issues of 40/100G line-cards, 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 line-card implementations and the achievable fiber transmission distance.


Benefits and Learning Objectives

This course should enable you to:

  • Identify key requirements and drivers for 40/100 Gbit/s applications.
  • Describe the availability and performance of 40/100 Gbit/s key building blocks.
  • Discuss 40/100 Gbit/s transmission limitations.
  • Describe lessons learned from 40/100 Gbit/s field trials.
  • Summarize 40/100 Gbit/s standards activities.

Intended Audience

The course is intended for engineers and technical managers who want an up-to-date overview of 40G/100G transmission systems, including applications, line-card designs, and fiber transmission limitations. It was significantly updated in 2009, and past attendees may find it useful to take the course again. Course requires some understanding of basic optical transmission systems.


Biography

Martin Birk received his master's and doctorate degrees from Germany’s University of Ulm in 1994 and 1999, respectively. Since 1999, he has been with AT&T Labs-Research in New Jersey, working on high-speed optical transmission at data rates of 40Gbit/s and above.

Benny Mikkelsen is co-founder and CTO at Acacia Communications, where he is responsible for the design of 100 Gbit/s optical transport products. Before Acacia, he co-founded Mintera and earlier was with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, where his research included ultra high speed optical transmission. He holds master's and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Denmark.