Optical Connections Magazine Industry Focus 2023-2024

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Success for NASA deep space optical comms trial

Earth during its two-year technology demonstration as Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California manages both DSOC and Psyche. The demo achieved “first light” in the early hours of Nov. 14 after its flight laser transceiver aboard Psyche capable of sending and re- ceiving near-infrared signals, locked onto an uplink laser beacon transmitted from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California. The uplink beacon helped

that control the pointing of the downlink laser aboard the transceiver. Once achieved, the project can begin its demonstration of maintaining high-bandwidth data transmission from the transceiver to Palomar at various distances from Earth. This data takes the form of bits (the smallest units of data a computer can pro- cess) encoded in the laser’s photons – quantum particles of light. After a special su- perconducting high-efficien- cy detector array detects the photons, new signal-pro- cessing techniques are used to extract the data from the single photons that arrive at the Hale Telescope.

NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment has beamed a near-infrared laser encoded with test data from nearly 10 million miles (16 million kilometres) away – about 40 times further than the Moon is from Earth – to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California. The organisation says this is the furthest- ever demonstration of optical communications. Riding aboard the recently launched Psyche spacecraft, DSOC is configured to send high- bandwidth test data to

the transceiver aim its down- link laser back to Palomar, in South Africa, while automat- ed systems on the transceiv- er and ground stations fine- tuned its pointing. Test data also was sent simultaneously via the uplink and downlink lasers, a procedure known as “closing the link” that is a primary objective for the experiment. While the tech- nology demonstration isn’t transmitting Psyche mission data, it works closely with the Psyche mission-support team to ensure DSOC op- erations don’t interfere with those of the spacecraft. With successful first light, the DSOC team will now work on refining the systems

Ultra-wideband transmission trial a success

along with a broadband O-band optical fibre amplifier (BDFA). KDDI Research, Sumi- tomo Electric, and Fu- rukawa Electric have been working toward practical application of multi-core optical fibres, which have multiple cores in a single optical fibre. In March 2023, KDDI Research, Furukawa Electric, and OFS conducted successful O-band coherent DWDM transmission experiments to utilise the O-band, which has approximately twice the transmission bandwidth of the C- and L-bands. Also in March 2023, Sumito- mo Electric presented a high-density uncoupled 12-core optical fibre with

6G era. Furthermore, the same transmission capacity can be secured with fewer fibre cores since the trans- mission capacity per optical fibre can be greatly expand- ed, and this technology is expected to enable the use of ordinary conduits and facilities with less space occupied. It adds that in the future, research and de- velopment will continue for transceivers, optical fibre amplifiers, and digital signal processing algorithms toward the practical ap- plication of ultrawideband O-band coherent DWDM transmission systems, with an aim of further increasing transmission of transmis- sion capacity between data centres.

KDDI Research, Sumitomo Electric, Furukawa Electric and OFS Laboratories, have conducted successful experiments on ultrawideband optical fibre transmission with a transmission bandwidth of 115.2 THz, which is around 24 times wider than conventional C-band, and is the world’s largest transmission capacity: 484 Tbps, over 31 km in optical fibre transmission experiments using standard optical fibre diameter. This was done by combining uncoupled optical fibre that has 12 independent cores densely arranged in a 250- μm coating, the same size as a standard optical fibre,

a coating diameter of 250 μm, the same diameter of standard optical fibres, making it ideal for creating high-density optical cables. The results were reported as a post-deadline paper at ECOC 2023. Sumitomo says that in the 6G era, it is expected that far more and diverse data will flow through net- works than at present due to the spread of IoT (Inter- net of Things) devices and mobility services, and it is essential to further expand the capacity of optical fibre communication to support networks. The success this time is in technology for supporting high-capacity, high-speed communication between data centres in the

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INDUSTRY FOCUS 2023/2024

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