An SNR-improved Transmitter of Delta-sigma Modulation Supported Ultra-High-Order QAM Signal for Fronthaul/WiFi Applications

In this paper, we proposed an improved mobile fronthaul architecture employing the SNR-improved delta-sigma digitization scheme and 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) format. Different from traditional 2-bit quantization, this scheme deploys two-fold delta-sigma quantization, which uses 1-bit delta-sigma modulator to quantize the signal, and another 1-bit delta-sigma modulator to quantize the in-band noise. A significant reduction of the in-band noise can be achieved only applying a differentiator, bringing about a much better noise shaping performance. Meanwhile, the two 1-bit streams can be combined and transmitted in a PAM-4 manner through an intensity modulation direct detection (IM-DD) channel. We have successfully experimentally demonstrated the digitization and transmission of 65536 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) baseband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal with sampling rate of 1.25 GSa/s over 20-km fiber with standard 10-Gbaud PAM-4 signal, with a signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 57.7 dB. Compared to the conventional 2-bit quantized OFDM scheme, experimental results show that a significant SNR improvement of 17.7 dB has been achieved by the proposed scheme. In addition, we also realized a transmission of 16384-QAM intermediate frequency (IF) signal at the center frequency of 3.5 GHz (with an SNR of 49.6 dB). An improvement of 15.9 dB can also be maintained.