Short Courses

SC259 Electronic and Optical Impairment Mitigation

Sunday, February 24, 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Chris Fludger; CoreOptics GmbH, Germany

Level: Advanced Beginner (basic understanding of topic is necessary to follow course material)

Course Description
As the channel bit-rate increases from 10 Gbit/s to 40 and 100 Gbit/s, chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD) become visible as limiting properties of optical network links. Next generation transmission equipment needs to be both affordable and tolerant to impairments in the channel. This course compares and contrasts electronic equalisation and optical compensation techniques. The principle of electronic impairment mitigators such as feed-forward and decision feedback equalisers or Maximum-Likelihood Sequence Estimators will be explained, and their performance compared. Electronic compensation using transmitter pre-distortion or coherent detection will also be discussed. These will be contrasted against more traditional optical compensation devices for CD and PMD.

Benefits and Learning Objectives
This course should enable you to:

• Explain the requirement for dynamic impairment mitigation devices.
• Explain the major options for electronic equalisers and optical PMD compensators.
• Describe the building blocks and operation of electronic equalizers.
• Explain analogue and digital electronic signal processing.
• Explain the difference between electronic equalizers that operate on the optical field, and those that use the directly detected signal.
• Quantify the performance of the different PMD and CD compensators.
• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of optical and electronic mitigation.

Intended Audience
This course is intended for individuals having a basic knowledge of digital lightwave transmission systems. It will be of value for industrial professionals (system designers, managers) who need to assess the different options of electronic and optical impairment mitigators, as well as for researchers who are new to the field.

Instructor Biography
Chris Fludger has received the MEng and PhD degrees in electronics engineering from Cambridge University, UK. At Nortel Networks he has worked on electronic signal processing, advanced modulation techniques and Raman amplification. He is currently working at CoreOptics, developing next generation 10G, 40G and 100G optical transmission modules for open tolerant networks.