Nonlinear Electrical Equalization for Multimode Fiber Systems

摘要

The multimode fiber (MMF) system is widely used in data centers for short-haul communications. Current MMF systems in use rely on Forward Error Correction (FEC) code to guarantee a desired bit error rate (BER). In this article, using test data of a 25Gb/s MMF system, we demonstrate that a MMF system possesses a mild nonlinearity and can be better compensated by a nonlinear filter based decision feedback equalizer (DFE) whose forward path is a non-causal Volterra filter and feedback path is linear finite impulse response (FIR) filter. With this approach, the reach of the MMF system can be extended from 100m to 300m.