Low power terabit /second optical interconnects for data centers

Power consumption of high density communication equipment in data centers is exceedingly increasing with Internet traffic, making a huge impact on the environment. Cooling and energy related cost is projected to be a dominant economical factor in data centers in the near future. Energy efficient high speed communication systems are required to lower overall carbon foot print of data centers. Traditional intensity modulation & direct detection systems using multi-mode fiber is expected to be replaced by spectral efficient coherent modulation formats over single mode fiber. Conventional digital coherent receivers used for long haul links dominates power budget of communication system due to huge amount of power consumed in analog to digital converters & numerous parallel interconnects and hence may not be suitable for short reach applications. Power consumption in the receiver can be reduced considerably by processing the received signals in analog domain itself. In this paper, we propose a short reach optical interconnect that can be scaled up to terabit /second capacity. Proposed system uses superchannel concept for maximizing bandwidth utilization and analog coherent receivers for drastically reducing power consumption.