Electronic Signal Processing to Improve System Performance of Optical Interconnects

The use of electronic filters to compensate for transmission impairments has attracted increasing interest over recent years, due to their low cost and size relative to alternative optical techniques (such as dispersion compensating fiber and optical filters) and the potential for their integration with existing transceiver electronics [1]-[3]. In addition, they offer the ability to compensate for multiple impairments simultaneously, and can be dynamically controlled, to account for time-varying link characteristics, caused, for example, by dynamic path switching or temperature-dependence of the optical components. In this work we discuss novel digital electronic solutions to achieve compensation of the impairments which occur in short optical links.