VLSI Implementations of Carrier Phase Recovery Algorithms for M-QAM Fiber-Optic Systems

Journal article, 2020

We present circuit implementations of blind phase search (BPS) carrier phase recovery (CPR) for M-QAM coherent optical receivers and highlight some BPS algorithm modifications necessary to obtain efficient VLSI circuits. In addition, we show how three key design parameters (input word length, number of test phases, and type and size of averaging window) affect the resulting implementation. To study design tradeoffs, we develop BPS CPR circuit netlists for a 32-GBaud system, using a 22-nm CMOS process technology: Our implementations reach energy efficiencies of around 1 pJ/bit for 16QAM up to 3 pJ/bit for 256QAM, at an SNR penalty of approximately 0.25 dB at a BER of 10^(−2). Furthermore, we present a circuit implementation of pilot-symbol-aided CPR, reaching 0.38 pJ/bit and 0.34 pJ/bit for 16QAM and 256QAM, respectively, at a slightly higher SNR penalty. The two CPR methods are also evaluated in terms of silicon area and scaling to higher-order modulation formats.