Enhanced Atmospheric Turbulence Resiliency in Free Space Optical Communication with Silicon-Photonics Based Grating Coupler Array and Maximal-Ratio-Combining (MRC) Algorithm

We propose and demonstrate an atmospheric-turbulence-mitigation scheme using an integrated vertical-grating-coupled Germanium-Silicon (GeSi) photodiode (PD) array processed with maximal-ratio-combining (MRC). Experimental results show improved outage probability at data-rate 46.4-Gbit/s, achieving hard-decision-forward-error-correction (HD-FEC) bit-error-rate (BER) threshold.