Accurate in-situ monitoring of Q-factor and BER using adaptive sampling in a 10Gb/s CMOS optical receiver IC

A high performance 10Gb/s CMOS optical receiver IC structure embedded with adaptive sampling function is reported. We demonstrate for the first time a highly accurate in-situ estimation of optical system performance using adaptive sampling technique. Q-factor and BER are measured for impaired signals and shown to compare well to data obtained using standard test equipment.