Real-Time Demonstration of Low-Complexity Time-Domain Chromatic Dispersion Equalization

We demonstrate real-time CD equalization (CDE) for coherent optical transmission systems using a low complexity time-domain (TD) multiplierless finite-impulse response (FIR)-based equalizer, based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation. The real-time operation is performed for a single-channel 2.5 Gb/s QPSK optical signal with a performance penalty of only 0.15 dB with respect to the maximum performance. The hardware complexity is also evaluated in terms of occupation in a Virtex-6 FPGA-XC6VLX240T, revealing the high efficiency of the proposed CDE algorithm