PDM-DQPSK Silicon Receiver With Integrated Monitor and Minimum Number of Controls

We demonstrate a novel polarization-division multiplexed differential quadrature phase-shift keying receiver. It has the minimum number of analog controls and an integrated polarization interference monitor for polarization tracking. It can theoretically tolerate polarization-dependent loss in the link. We achieve similar to 10 times tracking speed improvement, similar to 6-dB lower loss, and similar to 100 times lower average bit-error rate during most of the tracking over our previous work for 43-Gb/s PDM-DQPSK.