Hardware-efficient implementation and experimental demonstration of Hermitian-symmetric IFFT for optical DMT transmitter.

Optical discrete multi-tone (DMT) is one type of direct-detection optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (DDO-OFDM), and it is more suitable for cost-sensitive access networks and optical interconnections due to its simple structure. In DMT transmitter, inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) is an essential function for achieving OFDM modulation, and its input data are constrained to have Hermitian symmetry (HS). To support high-speed DMT signal generation, a fully-parallel implementation of IFFT is preferable. However, the hardware implementation of the conventional complex-valued IFFT (CC-IFFT) requires large area and has high power consumption. Based on the nature of HS, we design and implement a fully-parallel pipelined 128-point radix-2 decimation-in-time Hermitian-symmetric IFFT (HS-IFFT) by using a single field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. On-chip resource utilization is analyzed for both the proposed HS-IFFT and CC-IFFT. It exhibits that the HS-IFFT can save up to 35% multipliers, 49% registers and 43% look-up tables (LUTs) compared to the CC-IFFT. Also, by using the HS-IFFT and CC-IFFT, two FPGA-based real-time baseband DMT transmitters are implemented and power consumption is estimated. More than 32% of on-chip power is saved by using the HS-IFFT. Moreover, the two DMT transmitters are also experimentally demonstrated in a short-reach directly-modulated laser (DML)-based optical DMT system. The experimental results show that the HS-IFFT-DMT has the same bit error rate (BER) and error vector magnitude (EVM) performances as the CC-IFFT-DMT in both electrical/optical back-to-back cases (EB2B/OB2B) and post 20-km single-mode fiber (SMF) transmission.