Polarization-diversity receiver using remotely delivered local oscillator without optical polarization control

Abstract

Silicon photonics coherent transceivers have integrated all the necessary optics except the lasers. The laser source has become a major obstacle to further reduce the cost, footprint, power consumption of the coherent transceivers for short-reach optical interconnects. One solution is to utilize remotely delivered local oscillator (LO) from the transmitter, which has the benefits of relaxing the requirements of wavelength stability and laser linewidth and simplifying the digital signal processing (DSP) of carrier/phase recovery. However, a sophisticated adaptive polarization controller (APC) driven by a control loop in the electrical domain with a complicated algorithm is required to dynamically track and compensate for the polarization wandering of the received LO. In this paper, we propose a hybrid single-polarization coherent receiver and Stokes vector receiver (SVR) for polarization-diversity coherent detection without a need of optical polarization control for the remotely delivered LO. With such a scheme, we successfully received a 400-Gb/s dual-polarization constellation-shaped 64-QAM signal over 80-km fibers.