High Speed Communications Part 12 – Overview of Optical Communication Technologies Video

High Speed Communications Part 12 – Overview of Optical Communication Technologies

Alphawave’s CTO, Tony Chan Carusone, continues his technical talks on high-speed communications discussing the fundamental benefits of optical links. Compared to electrical links, optical fiber waveguides are inherently crosstalk-free, channel loss is low, and the response is relatively flat, so they require less equalization. There are two fiber types, single-mode and multimode, and two types of material, glass, and plastic, that are used to transmit optical signals. IMDD (intensity modulation direct detection) is a modulation that detects the intensity of light to represent logic levels; another modulation scheme is waveform division multiplexing (WDM). Optical applications, their specifications, and various impairments are described further in this last installment of high-speed communications, including extinction ratio and transmitter and dispersion eye closure quaternary, or TDECQ. Optical receiver front-end design can also be co-optimized and is critical in getting the right signal-to-noise ratio out of your design.

About the speaker:

Tony Chan Carusone is Chief Technology Officer at Alphawave Semi. Tony has been a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto since 2001.  He has well over 100 publications, including 8 award-winning best papers, focused on integrated circuits for digital communication.  Tony has served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society and on the Technical Program Committees of the world’s leading circuits conferences.  He co-authored the classic textbooks “Analog Integrated Circuit Design” and “Microelectronic Circuits” and he is a Fellow of the IEEE.  Tony has also been a consultant to the semiconductor industry for over 20 years, working with both startups and some of the largest technology companies in the world.

Tony holds a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto.