Compressive High-Speed Optical Transceiver

Abstract

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed an optical transceiver that uses compressive sensing to reduce bandwidth requirements and improve signal resolution.

Full Description

In communication systems, transceivers are used to send and receive information, commonly through optical fibers for high-frequency signals. Optical transceivers typically have bandwidth requirements that are proportional to Nyquist sampling rates of the data being captured, meaning that in high frequency applications the bandwidth requirements are substantial. This tradeoff creates an information bottleneck, limiting the performance and speed of other components in the system. An optical transceiver with the ability to compress data in some manner would greatly simplify applications in high-frequency signal processing and communication systems.

Researchers at the University of California Davis have developed a high-speed optical transceiver that uses compressive sensing to reduce bandwidth requirements by orders of magnitude. Signals processed by transceivers are typically sparse in the time-frequency domain; via compressive sensing, they can be accurately reconstructed using less samples than what is usually necessary. Compressive sensing allows the transceiver to operate at very high frequencies while using the same bandwidth as typical optical transceivers. Such a device can be implemented for analog-to-digital (ADC) signal conversion, and could significantly improve bandwidth and signal resolution by encoding more than 10 times the equivalent number of bits as existing transceivers. This is accomplished by spectral splicing of the signal on several devices operating in parallel, using a stable frequency comb as reference. This technology could offer significant improvements in the speed and performance of analog and digital signal processing.

Applications

• High frequency signal processing 
• High performance photonic analog-to-digital (ADC) conversion in THz frequency range.

Features/Benefits

• Reduced bandwidth requirements and improved signal resolution 
• Low noise

Patent Status