A High-Throughput VLSI Architecture for Real-Time Optical OFDM Systems With an Efficient Phase Equalizer

In this paper, a novel high-throughput very large scale integrated circuit architecture for a real-time implementation of intensity modulation direct detection optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system is proposed, achieving the highest throughput reported to date. The proposed architecture utilizes a fast, pipelined, and parallel inverse fast Fourier transform/fast Fourier transform in the transmitter/receiver, which is customized to satisfy the throughput requirements of the advanced optical systems. In addition, an efficient high-accuracy equalization method is developed, improving the system performance compared with the conventional linear equalizers. To evaluate the system performance, the OptiSystem software is used to model the optical channel and a Virtex-6 ML-605 evaluation board is used as the implementation platform. Moreover, the synthesis results in a 180-nm CMOS technology prove that the proposed architecture achieves a sustained throughput of 22.5 Gb/s with a 4.89-mm² core area.