Optical Transmitters without Driver Amplifiers—Optimal Operation Conditions
Institute of Electromagnetic Fields (IEF), ETH Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
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Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(9), 1652; https://doi.org/10.3390/app8091652
Received: 22 August 2018
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Revised: 7 September 2018
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Accepted: 10 September 2018
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Published: 14 September 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced DSP Techniques for High-Capacity and Energy-Efficient Optical Fiber Communications)
An important challenge in optical communications is the generation of highest-quality waveforms with a Mach–Zehnder modulator with a limited electrical swing (Vpp). For this, we discuss, under limited Vpp, the influence of the waveform design on the root-mean-square amplitude, and thus, the optical signal quality. We discuss the influence of the pulse shape, clipping, and digital pre-distortion on the signal quality after the electrical-to-optical conversion. Our simulations and experiments, e.g., suggest that pre-distortion comes at the expense of electrical swing of the eye-opening and results in a lower optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR). Conversely, digital post-distortion provides operation with larger eye-openings, and therefore, provides an SNR increase of at least 0.5 dB. Furthermore, we find that increasing the roll-off factor increases the electrical swing of the eye-opening. However, there is negligible benefit of increasing the roll-off factor of square-root-raised-cosine pulse shaped signals beyond 0.4. The findings are of interest for single-channel intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) links, as well as optical coherent communication links.
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Keywords:
optical communications; fiber optics communications; modulators; mitigation of optical transceiver impairments
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MDPI and ACS Style
Josten, A.; Baeuerle, B.; Bonjour, R.; Heni, W.; Leuthold, J. Optical Transmitters without Driver Amplifiers—Optimal Operation Conditions. Appl. Sci. 2018, 8, 1652. https://doi.org/10.3390/app8091652
AMA Style
Josten A, Baeuerle B, Bonjour R, Heni W, Leuthold J. Optical Transmitters without Driver Amplifiers—Optimal Operation Conditions. Applied Sciences. 2018; 8(9):1652. https://doi.org/10.3390/app8091652
Chicago/Turabian StyleJosten, Arne, Benedikt Baeuerle, Romain Bonjour, Wolfgang Heni, and Juerg Leuthold. 2018. "Optical Transmitters without Driver Amplifiers—Optimal Operation Conditions" Applied Sciences 8, no. 9: 1652. https://doi.org/10.3390/app8091652
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