A Multi-Carrier QAM Transceiver for Ultra-Wideband Optical Communication

The feasibility of a 40 Gb/s subcarrier modulated optical transmission system using low-cost optoelectronic components and CMOS IC technology is presented. The optical channel impairments are studied. A complete DSP framework is developed to cancel out the optical channel impairments as well as analog circuit imperfections. To validate that the 40 Gb/s system can be implemented in CMOS, an integrated QAM-16 transceiver with a carrier frequency of 13.32 GHz was designed and fabricated in a 0.14 mu m, 1.5 V CMOS technology. The test chip occupies 3.6 mm(2) of area and consumes 340 mW of power. Measurement results for a transmission link consisting of the CMOS QAM-16 modulator/demodulator, a directly modulated laser (DML), a 30 km single mode fiber and a p-i-n photo-detector are reported.