Fiber-on-Chip: Digital Emulation of Channel Impairments for Real-Time DSP Evaluation

We describe the Fiber-on-Chip (FoC) approach to verification of digital signal processing (DSP) circuits, where digital models of a fiber-optic communication system are implemented in the same hardware as the DSP under test. The approach can enable cost-effective long-term DSP evaluations without the need for complex optical-electronic testbeds with high-speed interfaces, shortening verification time and enabling deep bit-error rate evaluations. Our FoC system currently contains a digital model of a transmitter generating a pseudo-random bitstream and a digital model of a channel with additive white Gaussian noise, phase noise and polarization-mode dispersion. In addition, the FoC system contains digital features for real-time control of channel parameters, using low-speed communication interfaces, and for autonomous real-time analysis, which enable us to batch multiple unsupervised emulations on the same hardware. The FoC system can target both field-programmable gate arrays, for fast evaluation of fixed-point logic, and application-specific integrated circuits, for accurate power dissipation measurements.