Sub-rate sampled, non-integer fractionally spaced Volterra nonlinear equalizer for IM/DD systems

Abstract

As high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADC) account for a significant portion of the receiver’s cost in intensity-modulation (IM)/direct-detection (DD) systems, there have been substantial efforts to employ an ADC operating at a relatively low sampling rate. However, half-symbol-spaced electronic nonlinear equalizers used to compensate for nonlinear waveform distortions commonly operate at 2 samples/symbols, and thus require digital upsampling before the equalization. This implies that the digital signal processing (DSP) at the receiver should also operate at 2 sample/symbol even though the ADC operates at the sub-rate (i.e., < 2 sample/symbol). Hence, we propose and experimentally demonstrate the sub-rate sampled, non-integer fractionally spaced Volterra nonlinear equalizer (VNLE). This equalizer does not require the digital upsampling, and thus makes the entire receiver DSP block operating at the sub-rate, the same as the sampling rate of ADC. We estimate the complexity of the proposed equalizer by the number of multipliers required for its implementation. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed VNLE over a 64-Gb/s 4-ary pulse amplitude modulation link and compare the performance with the conventional VNLE (requiring digital upsampling). The results show that the proposed VNLE incurs a very slight performance degradation compared with the conventional VNLE, but reduces the implementation complexity considerably since it obviates the need for digital upsampling at the receiver.