CHIC group will present for the first time, a self-equalizing photo detector capable of equalizing high speed optical communication signals. This work is authored by graduate student Behrooz Abiri, former post-doc Dr. Firooz Aflatouni, who is now a faculty member of University of Pennsylvania and Prof. Ali Hajimiri.
The paper describes a self-equalizing photo-detector (SEPD) that mitigates the bandwidth limitations of electro-optical components of optical communication systems. The SEPD enables higher rate of data transmission, using slower components. Unlike other all-optical equalization schemes, SEPD is optically wide band, thus does not require wavelength tuning. Optical communication links which use on-off keying scheme for transmitting data, rely on a flat frequency response up to around 0.7 times of their data rate. The bandwidth limitation of electronic circuits and electro-optical components such as optical modulator and photo-detector limit the data rate that can be used for OOK modulation. A SEPD allows higher data rate transmission by increasing the electro-optical bandwidth of the system. This channel equalization is enable through a new optically wideband electro-optical FIR filter using optical waveguides as delay elements.
