Optoelectronic signal processing for chromatic dispersion mitigation in direct detection systems

An optical pre-processing structure is used to reduce the burden of digital equalizers and increase transmission reach for a direct detected system impaired by chromatic dispersion. The optical pre-processing consists of the optical signal being sliced into narrow frequency sub-band by an optical filter. Two distinct filters are numerically investigated: an arbitrary waveguide grating (AWG) filter and a series of cascaded Mach-Zehnder delay interferometers (MZDI). Each signal’s spectral slice is detected by a photodetector and used as input for the digital equalizer. Two options are also considered for equalization: a feedforward neural network (NN) equalizer and a recurrent neural network with reservoir computing (RC). The results are analyzed in simulation in terms of signal-to-noise penalty at the KP4 forward error correction threshold. The penalty is calculated with respect to a back-to-back transmission without equalization. A 32 GBd on-off transmission shows 0 dB penalty at ≈25 km transmission reach with optoelectronic processing with FNN and at ≈40 km with RC.