Predistortion of Mach-Zehnder Modulator Using Symmetric Imbalance

Impairments of Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) set a sever performance limit on transmitting high-order modulation signals such as M-QAM, optical OFDM or M-PAM in high-speed fiber optics communication links. Various predistortion methods were proposed for compensating MZM effects; however, they do not...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of lightwave technology 2017-07, Vol.35 (13), p.2757-2768
Main Authors: Paryanti, Gil, Sadot, Dan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analog to digital converters
Digital pre-distortion techniques
Digital to analog conversion
Digital to analog converters
Distortion
Fiber optics
Floating point arithmetic
Mach-Zehnder interferometers
Modulation
Optical distortion
optical fiber communication
Optical fibers
optical modulation
Optical transmitters
Optimization methods
penalty-free transmission
quadrature amplitude modulation
silicon photonics
Transfer functions
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Impairments of Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) set a sever performance limit on transmitting high-order modulation signals such as M-QAM, optical OFDM or M-PAM in high-speed fiber optics communication links. Various predistortion methods were proposed for compensating MZM effects; however, they do not compensate for all types of impairments and they require significant computation resources for each additional impairment needed to be corrected. In order to overcome these difficulties, a new predistortion approach is proposed. The method is based on adding an imbalance symmetrically to the information applied to the MZM arms. The imbalance predistorts the signal in a way that the overall effect of the symmetric imbalance and MZM impairments is minimized by means of mean square error. A closed form as well as an optimization method that compensates for all MZM impairments with a single and low complexity infrastructure is presented. Analysis includes floating point as well as fixed point, considering digital to analog converter effects. It is shown that the overall method performance is limited only by the number of bits N of the digital-to-analog converter so that the MZM output error vector magnitude is bounded by 10-6N [dB].
ISSN:0733-8724
1558-2213
DOI:10.1109/JLT.2017.2697721