Optical wireless and wireline communication technologies have attracted wide research efforts due to various advantages, such as high flexibility, security and wide unlicensed spectrum. In the emerging 5G network, optical wireless communication can provide ubiquitous access points for Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and ease the ever-increasing radio spectrum congestion problem. Optical wireline communication is rapidly migrating towards 400G Ethernet for high-speed and low-latency data center interconnections. This thesis focuses on the transceiver designs with novel and enhanced equalization and jitter compensation functions for high-speed optical wireless and wireline communication.

In the first part, a PAM-4 wireless optical communication system using a RGB LED as light source is...[ Read more ]

Optical wireless and wireline communication technologies have attracted wide research efforts due to various advantages, such as high flexibility, security and wide unlicensed spectrum. In the emerging 5G network, optical wireless communication can provide ubiquitous access points for Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and ease the ever-increasing radio spectrum congestion problem. Optical wireline communication is rapidly migrating towards 400G Ethernet for high-speed and low-latency data center interconnections. This thesis focuses on the transceiver designs with novel and enhanced equalization and jitter compensation functions for high-speed optical wireless and wireline communication.

In the first part, a PAM-4 wireless optical communication system using a RGB LED as light source is presented. The RGB LED units are modulated separately using 3-bit thermometer codes. The three-path RGB NRZ optical signals superpose mutually in free space and produce the PAM-4 optical signal. A piece-wise FFE based pre-equalization and 3-stage continuoustime linear equalizer base post-equalization are employed to compensate for the RGB LED unit bandwidth difference. The highest data rate of the system can be extended from 28 Mbps to 75 Mbps using the proposed equalization scheme, achieving an extension ratio of 2.67.

In the second part, a quarter-rate PAM-4 receiver with a jitter compensate clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit is presented for optical wireline communication. The proposed CDR architecture can overcome the stringent trade-off between jitter transfer (JTRAN) and jitter tolerance bandwidth (JTOL BW). The Prototyped 40-nm CMOS Rx test chip achieves errorfree operation with PAM-4 input from 30 to 60 Gb/s. The JCCDR achieves a 40-MHz JTOL BW with over 0.2-UIPP jitter amplitude while maintaining a -8-dB JTRAN. A jitter compensation ratio of around 60% has been achieved up to 40 MHz.

Finally, in the last part, the bandwidth extension schemes developed in the previous system is applied to a wireless power and data transmission system, which provides simultaneous wireless charging and communication accesses for IoT devices. A three-stage continuoustime- linear-equalizer (CTLE) is used to compensate for the narrow and distance-dependent bandwidth of wireless power and data transfer (WPDT) systems. A receiver front-end circuit with the proposed CTLE and multiple-stage filter is implemented to decoupling the data and power signal. The highest data rate extension ratio of 85% has been achieved from 350 kbps to 650 kbps at a transmission distance of 0.6 m, which is 2.4 times the radii of the transceiver coil.