Interferometric fiber optic gyroscope (IFOG) is advantageous for inertial navigation due to its high reliability as a solid-state technology with no moving parts. The size, weight, power, and cost of IFOG can be improved by employing photonic integration technology. Here, by leveraging the foundry-enabled silicon photonics platform, we demonstrate a silicon multi-function integrated optical circuit (Si-MIOC) with a fingertip size that can easily interfaces with light source and fiber coil to perform a tactical-grade gyroscope (0.1 °/hr bias instability). This achievement comes from the pros of high-index-contrast silicon waveguide that enables high polarization extinction ratio of > 60 dB and high electro-optic efficiency in silicon phase modulator, while the cons of the signature lead to non-negligible optical back-reflection at silicon/fiber interfaces and generate spurious bias voltage offset at the gyroscope outputs. Nevertheless, the results of earth rotation measurement and Allan deviation analysis confirmed that Si-MIOC based IFOG is a promising angular sensor and can be utilized to construct a compact and low-cost inertial measurement unit.

This work theoretically studies the transmission performance of a DML-based OFDM system by small-signal approximation, and the model considers both the transient and adiabatic chirps. The dispersion-induced distortion is modeled as subcarrier-to-subcarrier intermixing interference (SSII), and the theoretical SSII agrees with the distortion obtained from large-signal simulation statistically and deterministically. The analysis shows that the presence of the adiabatic chirp will ease power fading or even provide gain, but will increase the SSII to deteriorate OFDM signals after dispersive transmission. Furthermore, this work also proposes a novel iterative equalization to eliminate the SSII. From the simulation, the distortion could be effectively mitigated by the proposed equalization such that the maximum transmission distance of the DML-based OFDM signal is significantly improved. For instance, the transmission distance of a 30-Gbps DML-based OFDM signal can be extended from 10 km to more than 100 km. Besides, since the dispersion-induced distortion could be effectively mitigated by the equalization, negative power penalties are observed at some distances due to chirp-induced power gain.

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This study compared two nonlinear distortion compensation techniques, SSII cancellation (in the frequency domain) and Volterra filtering (in the time domain), in a >50-Gbps/λ OFDM-IMDD LR-PON. Experiment results for SNR, BER, and data rate (based on a bit-loading algorithm) revealed that the performance of frequency-domain SSII cancellation is unaffected by power fading; however, it depends heavily on the precision of the mathematical model. Conversely, although time-domain Volterra filtering is affected by the faded waveform, adaptive-weighting provides flexibility in dealing with mixed nonlinear distortion, particularly that associated with the interplay between fiber dispersion and fiber nonlinearity. 4-channel WDM-OFDM and 3rd-order Volterra filtering were used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme in a 200-Gbps IMDD system. Based on 10-GHz EAM and PIN, we achieved 200-Gbps transmission over a distance of 60 km with a loss budget of >30 dB, while providing support for 128 ONUs at >1.6 Gbps/ONU without the need for an inline amplifier or pre-amplifier.

This work presents a novel scheme for a 4-dimensional (D) frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDAR, which demonstrates an unprecedentedly high velocity sensitivity. This is achieved by utilizing the driving waveform to minimize the phase noise originating from the distributed feedback (DFB) laser during the wavelength sweeping process on the transmitting side, while on the receiving end, we use a combination of a self-injection-locked oscillator (SILO) and an avalanche photodiode (APD) with a cascaded multiplication layer, to ensure excellent responsivity and saturation current performance. Comparison is made with a reference LiDAR system comprised of the traditional radio-frequency (RF) oscillator with a p-i-n PD at the receiving-end. The results show that our SILO + APD design provides much better quality 4-D images of slow-moving objects (5 μm/sec) and state-of-the-art velocity sensitivity. This can be attributed to a reduction in the phase noise of the down-converted baseband signals, which is beneficial to the resolution of a small Doppler frequency shift. Furthermore, the incorporation of a high-performance APD also improves the contrast ratio between the object and the background pixels. These improvements offer new possibilities for the development of the next generation of 4-D FMCW LiDARs capable of simultaneously providing the absolute 3-D geometric size and small vibration information.

We experimentally demonstrate a practical visible light communication (VLC) system of 3.2-m transmission using spectrally efficient discrete multitone (DMT) or carrierless amplitude phase (CAP) modulation. The transmitters consist of two light emitting diodes (LEDs) spaced 2 m apart, the arrangement of which corresponds to a common case for full-range illumination in indoor environments, and this work also investigates the influence of the difference in transmission path lengths from the LEDs to a single receiver. In the overlapped illumination area, the delay interference between the LEDs could result in up to about 40% capacity reduction using quaternary CAP or bit-loaded DMT signals, when two LEDs simply transmit the same signal. To mitigate the impact of the delay interference, Alamouti space–time block coding (STBC) is employed for both DMT and CAP signals, and the combination of CAP and STBC is proposed for the first time to the authors’ best knowledge. Employing STBC, we successfully demonstrate interference-tolerant VLC over 3.2-m air transmission, and the maximum data rates for DMT and CAP signals are 220 and 150 Mbps, respectively.