Fiber-induced nonlinear limitation in 400-Gbps single-channel coherent optical interconnects

Coherent optical interconnects with up to 400-Gbps transmission rates and distances exceeding 80 km have been proposed to meet the increasing capacity demand of inter-datacenter communications. The interplay between the fiber Kerr effect and the receiver noise posses an upper-bound to the transmission distance. In this paper, we used numerical simulations to find the maximum achievable range of 400-Gbps unrepeated single-wavelength links with single and dual polarization. Simulations reveal that, for a forward error correction code limit of 10-3, the maximum distance is 145 km for dual-polarization, which can be used as a benchmark to assess the transmitter/receiver-induced penalties.