65,536-QAM OFDM signal transmission over a fiber-THz system at 320 GHz with delta-sigma modulation.

The transmission of a 65,536-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal supported by a hybrid fiber-terahertz (THz) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system at 320 GHz is experimentally demonstrated in this Letter. We adopt the polarization division multiplexing (PDM) technique to double the spectral efficiency. Based on a 23-GBaud 16-QAM link, 2-bit delta-sigma modulation (DSM) quantization enables 65,536-QAM OFDM signal transmission over a 20-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) and a 3-m 2 × 2 MIMO wireless delivery, and satisfies the hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold of 3.8 × 10, corresponding to a net rate of 60.5 Gbit/s for THz-over-fiber transport. Meanwhile, below the fronthaul error vector magnitude (EVM) threshold of 0.34%, a maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 52.6 dB is achieved. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest modulation order achievable for DSM applications in THz communication.