Reservoir computing for equalization in a self-coherent receiver scheme

Short-reach optical networks, the backbone of data centers, face a significant challenge: transmitting high data rates at low cost and low energy consumption. While coherent signals can carry high data rates, coherent receivers are expensive and complex. Also, to equalize channel dispersion, they rely on digital signal processing modules, which consume large amounts of power and introduce more latency. Photonic reservoirs emerged as a way to process these signals in the analog optical domain, alleviating the power consumption and latency issues in state-of-the-art receivers. In this work, we show in simulations that a photonic reservoir combined with a self-coherent photonic receiver achieves a BER of 3.8 × 10^-3 for a 32 Gbaud 16-QAM signal and an 80 km link, requiring a low CSPR of 3 dB compared to state-of-the-art self-coherent receivers.