NEC News Release
NEC Demonstrates First Terabit/s Superchannel Transmission over 10,000km
Tokyo, January 10, 2012 – NEC Corporation (NEC) has announced the successful experimental demonstration of 1.15-Tb/s ultra-long haul optical
transmission over 10,000 kilometers using optical superchannel technology. This is the first instance that a terabit/s
channel generated from a single laser source has been transmitted over such a distance. Four superchannels were
transmitted together by wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) to achieve a total capacity of 4 Tb/s and a spectral
efficiency of 3.6 b/s/Hz. The results clearly demonstrate that practical high-capacity transmission for transoceanic
communication can be achieved using cost-effective superchannel technology.
Optical superchannels allow phase-locked carriers with independent modulation to overlap in frequency following the
principles of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). This enables efficient bandwidth utilization, allowing
higher spectral efficiency and higher data rate per laser through parallelization. NEC's system uses state-of-the-art
hardware and advanced techniques, including optical multi-tone generation, large-core/ultra low-loss fiber, intradyne
digital coherent detection, and digital equalization at higher oversampling, along with well-established technologies
such as EDFAs and DP-QPSK modulation. The experiment yielded a 2-dB system margin above the hard decision FEC threshold
without using processing-intensive MAP or MLSE algorithms.
This work was conducted by NEC Laboratories America, NEC's research group in Princeton, New Jersey, USA and the result
was published as a post-deadline paper in the recent Asia Communications and Photonics Conference (ACP 2011) in
Shanghai, China, after rigorous scrutiny by the ACP program committee.
"This success is another example of NEC's continuing leadership in high capacity, long distance optical communication
technologies, following its record achievements of 101.7 Tb/s per fiber for single core fiber transmission, the first
terabit field trial with coexisting 100G, 450G and 1T signals on the same fiber, and the highest order QAM optical
transmission of 1024QAM" confirmed Dr. Yasuhiro Aoki, General Manager for NEC's Submarine Network business.
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About NEC Laboratories America, Inc.
NEC Laboratories America, Inc. (NEC Labs), located in Princeton, NJ and Cupertino, CA, and a subsidiary of NEC
Corporation of America, is the U.S. arm of NEC's global network of research centers. Long recognized as one of the most
preeminent and innovative research institutions of its kind, NEC Labs' primary focus is on technology research and early
market validation in support of NEC's core businesses globally and in the U.S. Its research scope includes autonomic
management, computing systems architecture, data management, energy management, machine learning, media analytics,
mobile communications and networking, optical networking, quantum IT, storage systems and system analysis and
verification. For more information visit www.nec-labs.com.
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