4.7 Article

Hardware-Efficient Duobinary Neural Network Equalizers for 800 Gb/s IM/DD PAM4 Transmission Over 10 km SSMF

Journal

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY
Volume 41, Issue 12, Pages 3783-3790

Publisher

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/JLT.2023.3268579

Keywords

Chromatic dispersion mitigation; digital signal processing; intensity modulation direct detection; neural network equalizer

Ask authors/readers for more resources

In this article, the challenges and options for scaling IM/DD transceivers towards 800 Gbps are discussed. The focus is on CWDM4 PAM4 transmission over a target distance of 10 km in O-band. Chromatic dispersion (CD) is identified as the main challenge, which can be mitigated through digital signal processing. The use of neural network equalization and magnitude weight pruning can significantly reduce hardware complexity without performance loss.
In this article, we discuss challenges and options for scaling IM/DD transceivers towards 800 Gbps. Our focus is CWDM4 PAM4 transmission and our target distance is 10 km in O-band, which is a most urgent use case for next generation optical short reach systems like data centre interconnects and networks. At this reach and rate, chromatic dispersion (CD) becomes the main challenge. Its mitigation is essential and primarily done with digital signal processing. State of the art techniques, however, make transceivers quickly too complex. We show upon measurement results how neural network equalization can meet Volterra equalization performance with 30% less hardware multiplier complexity. When also applying magnitude weight pruning, an additional 43% reduction is possible without performance loss across all CWDM4 lanes. If needed, an added MLSE stage can further push performance in both cases. In any of these configurations, a key enabler against strong CD penalties is duobinary training, which is applicable to all feed-forward equalization architectures.

Authors

I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.

Reviews

Primary Rating

4.7
Not enough ratings

Secondary Ratings

Novelty
-
Significance
-
Scientific rigor
-
Rate this paper

Recommended

No Data Available
No Data Available