Online digital offset mismatch compensation for high-speed time-interleaved ADC in real-time optical OFDM receiver

The time-interleaved analog-to-digital converter (TI-ADC) is a good option to realize high-speed data conversion for both single-carrier and multi-carrier optical communication systems. Offset mismatch is one of its drawbacks, which causes distortion in the sampled data and degrades the bit error rate (BER) performance of communication systems. In this article, a low-complexity online digital offset mismatch compensation (OMC) scheme based on time-domain averaging is proposed and implemented with a commercial off-the-shelf field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip for high-speed optical OFDM communications. The proposed OMC scheme is experimentally demonstrated in real-time direct-detection optical OFDM receiver with a 5 GS/s TI-ADC. The experimental results show that the BER performance can be improved by more than an order of magnitude, by using the proposed OMC scheme, for both 16- and 64-QAM modulation formats. The receiver sensitivity can be improved by more than 5-dB in terms of the received optical power at the BER of 1e-3. What's more, the real-time measured BER performance is similar to that of by using offline DSP approaches and has good stability during the measurement period. Numerical simulations are performed under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel to fully verify the performance of the OMC scheme. It exhibits that the error floor in BER performance can be eliminated by using the OMC scheme and a negligible signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalty can be achieved compared with that of offset mismatch-free case.