OFC 2026 Top-Scored Paper | AllianStream Photonics and SJTU Develop "Card-Size" High-Performance DAS Interrogator

The Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2026, the premier global confere

nce in optical communications and optical sensing, has successfully concluded. As a key industry technology benchmark, OFC gathers top global research and industrial resources, representing the most cutting-edge and authoritative innovations in optoelectronics.

At this conference, the achievement of in-depth industry-university-research collaboration between Ningbo AllianStream Photonics Technology Co., Ltd. and Professor Zuyuan He’s team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU)—a hybrid photonic integrated Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) interrogator—was selected as a Top-Scored paper for its ultra-high integration and leading performance, gaining wide recognition from international peers.

Industry Challenges: Single Integration Platform Cannot Support High-Performance DAS

DAS has become a key technology for long-haul, fully distributed vibration and strain monitoring, widely used in critical fields including oil and gas pipelines, smart grids, rail transit, marine monitoring, and security pre-alert.

Driven by surging demand for on-site deployment, portability, and embedded applications, conventional discrete-component DAS interrogators face growing limitations in size, power consumption, and stability. Meanwhile, single-material platforms have inherent drawbacks:

• Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI): enables high-density integration but lacks high-performance on-chip light sources.
• Indium Phosphide (InP): supports laser integration but suffers from high passive waveguide loss.

Balancing high-performance light sources and large-scale photonic integration has become the core bottleneck for DAS miniaturization and industrialization.

✨Technological Innovation: InP + SOI Hybrid Integration for Extreme Miniaturization

This work innovatively adopts a hybrid integration scheme of an InP-based narrow-linewidth external-cavity laser and an SOI photonic integrated circuit (PIC), realizing high-efficiency coupling via micro-optics and breaking the constraints of single material platforms.

Hybrid integrated DAS interrogator

1. Chip-Level Ultra-High Integration

The SOI PIC monolithically integrates full core functions:

• Transmitter: Mach–Zehnder Modulator (MZM)
• Receiver: Polarization Beam Rotator Splitter (PBRS), 90° optical hybrid, Balanced Photodetector (BPD)
• Auxiliary functions: thermo-optic tunable switch, thermo-optic tunable splitter, Multi-Mode Interference (MMI) coupler

The chip measures only 4.95 mm × 2.80 mm and is fabricated using CMOS-compatible processes for mass production.

2. Ultra-Compact Module Packaging

The module adopts an integrated optical-electrical-thermal design:

• Dimensions: only 40 mm × 40 mm × 10 mm
• Built-in high-precision Thermoelectric Cooler (TEC) temperature control
• Integrated micro-lenses, optical isolators, and fiber array
• A single module fulfills full functions: transmission, modulation, reception, and detection

Schematic of experimental system for the integrated DAS interrogator verification

Performance Verification: High-Performance Stable Output over 10 km Fiber

The chip supports multiple DAS architectures. In the experiment, the team validated the system using the Time-Gated Digital Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (TGD-OFDR) architecture over a 10 km G.652.D single-mode sensing fiber:

• Strain resolution: 73.27 pε/√Hz
• Spatial resolution: ~4 m
• Sensing distance: 10 km

Demodulation results for the 10 km sensing fiber

This breakthrough enables portable DAS, as well as pluggable and card-type DAS, transitioning DAS from traditional rack-mounted equipment to chip-scale, modular, lightweight, and embedded deployment.

Industry-University-Research Collaboration: From Lab to Industrial Deployment

This achievement is a landmark output of long-term cooperation between SJTU and AllianStream Photonics:

• SJTU: in charge of chip design, packaging design, system algorithms, and experimental verification.
• AllianStream Photonics: responsible for module integration, engineering optimization, and industrialization.

The two parties have built a complete innovation chain: basic research → chip R&D → module products → industry solutions.

Application Outlook

The ultra-highly integrated hybrid photonic DAS interrogator will drastically reduce DAS equipment size, weight, and cost while enhancing long-term reliability. It can be widely applied to:

• Online optical cable monitoring for smart grids
• Safety early warning for oil and gas pipelines
• Vibration sensing for rail transit networks
• Marine seismic and underwater acoustic monitoring
• Integrated communication and sensing operation for data centers

Going forward, AllianStream Photonics will continue to partner with SJTU to accelerate DAS development toward higher integration, lower power consumption, and broader applications.

Paper Information

Zhicheng Jin, Jiageng Chen, Zhengwen Li, Hanzhao Li, Keke Hu, Xuhui Yu, and Zuyuan He. Hybrid Photonic Integrated Interrogator for Distributed Acoustic Sensing, OFC 2026, W4D.2, Los Angeles, March 2026

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