Enhancing the Bandwidth of DACs by Analog Bandwidth Interleaving

The rising demand for high-speed data transmission systems requires the upgrade of existing fiber-optic transport networks. A key component of nowadays fiber optics links are fast digital-to-analog converters (DACs), which are mainly limited by their bandwidth. We present a novel concept called analog bandwidth interleaving to increase the bandwidth of DACs by interleaving multiple DACs in the frequency domain. A multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) digital signal processing (DSP) algorithm is presented undoing the crosstalk between the frequency bands. Moreover, the concept is validated experimentally using two low-speed DACs.