Digital Lightwave Receivers: An Experimentally Validated System Model

In this letter, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that is typically employed in current state-of-the-art high bit rate lightwave communication systems experiments is characterized for a broad range of input powers in order to develop a reliable model for simulation purposes. We show that the receiver performance is dominated by the digitizer noise, especially at low powers. This is particularly important for burst-mode receivers that have to cope with a large variation in input power. Simulation results show a good agreement with experimentally received intensity modulated data at 10.7 Gb/s with powers ranging from - 6 to - 18 dBm.