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

Sunday, March 22, 2009
1:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m.
Martin Birk¹, Benny Mikkelsen²; ¹AT&T Labs, Res., USA, ²Mintera, USA
Level: Advanced Beginner (basic understanding of topic is necessary to follow course material)

Course Description

Historically, increasing the data rates by a factor of four reduced the cost per transmitted unit bandwidth by ~40%. In 2006, commercial mass deployments of 40G were announced for Internet backbone upgrades in service provider's networks. Going forward, the expectation of 40G deployments is to further reduce network costs while increasing capacity. The first part of this course provides an overview of the drivers and applications of 40G transmission systems in Long-Haul, Regional and Metro networks. It describes the requirements and expectations carriers will have to cost, power consumption, footprint, reliability and interoperability of 40G systems.

The second part of the course focuses on practical design of 40G line-cards for short and long reach applications. We critically review the availability and performance of the key building blocks, i.e., transmitter and receiver parts, as well as serdes and FEC devices. We discuss the technologies needed to implement different modulation formats, and the corresponding trade-off between complexity/cost of line-cards and the achievable fiber transmission distance. We also consider spectral efficiency and tolerance to optical filtering. Furthermore, we discuss the transmission limitations imposed by different fiber impairments (such as chromatic dispersion/slope, polarization mode dispersion and fiber nonlinearities) when transmitting 40G DWDM channels over various fiber types, and we discuss techniques to mitigate their impact. Measured data will be used throughout the course.

The third part of this course reviews the lessons learned from first 40G field-deployments and assesses the needs for field test equipment and fiber characterization to enable practical deployment of 40G systems. The course highlights specific areas where progress is desired to enable seamless transitions to 40G channel rates from today’s 10G transmission systems.

Benefits and Learning Objectives

This course should enable you to:

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

Intended Audience

The course is intended for engineers and technical managers who want an up-to-date overview of 40G transmission systems, including applications, line-card designs, and fiber transmission limitations. 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 vice president of systems and technology at Mintera, where he is responsible for the design of Mintera’s 40Gb/s optical transport products. Before co-founding Mintera, he 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.