A High-Speed Optical Vector Signal Time-Domain Analysis System Based on Linear Optical Sampling

As the modulation rate in high-speed optical communication systems continues to increase and modulation formats become increasingly complex, conventional electrical-domain sampling techniques, limited by the “electronic bottleneck,” are unable to meet the time-domain analysis requirements of optical vector signals with bandwidths exceeding 100 GHz. In this paper, a system based on linear optical sampling (LOS) is implemented for time-domain analysis of high-speed polarization-division-multiplexed (PDM) optical vector signals. An unbalanced input method is proposed to ensure the integrity of the sampling clock when the power of the signal under test is zero; a resampling method combined with soft integration is proposed to replace the conventional peak detection method, improving the accuracy of sampling point position and amplitude information extraction; and an adaptive frequency offset estimation algorithm is proposed to compensate for the continuously varying frequency offset caused by the use of low-repetition-rate sampling pulses. We constructed a signal acquisition system for optical vector signal measurement based on LOS. Using the above methods, the eye diagrams and constellation diagrams of 50 Gbaud PDM-QPSK (quadrature phase-shift keying), PDM-16QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation), and PDM-32QAM signals are successfully measured, and related parameters, including error vector magnitude (EVM) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), are calculated. The experimental results show that the proposed system achieves quasi-real-time measurement of 500 Gbps optical vector signals, and the measured performance parameters are on the same order of magnitude as those obtained from a commercial high-speed oscilloscope.