Waveform Interface for the Fiber-on-Chip Emulation Environment

Abstract

Testing digital signal processing (DSP) implementations for telecommunications is often conducted using digital emulation environments that generate synthetic transmissions based on channel models. However, digital emulation of channel models presents a series of limitations when testing DSPs and may not represent their actual performance in a working environment. This project aims to develop a waveform interface capable of storing and reconstructing optical fiber transmissions, allowing a real-time digital emulation environment to test DSP implementations with experimental data.

To this end, this project was based on the Chalmers Optical Fiber Channel Emulator (CHOICE), a VHDL implementation of the Fiber-on-Chip approach; which offers a way of testing DSP implementations using field-programmable gate array (FPGA) emulation of fiber-optic channels. This project resulted in a series of modules that enable the CHOICE environment to store experimental data on external double data rate (DDR) modules and generate continuous waveforms by stitching together short fiber transmissions.

The resulting system offers a novel way of testing DSP implementations for fiber optic communications systems with experimental data captured from optical transmissions, evaluating metrics like bit-error rate for large sample sizes at a higher speed than traditional fixed-point emulation environments.