Adaptive Trigonometric-based Nonlinear Equalizer for SiPM-Based PAM-8 VLC System

Silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) has higher receiver sensitivity than traditional PIN and APD but suffers from nonlinearity due to the dead time. In this paper, we propose an adaptive trigonometric-based nonlinear equalizer (ATNLE) to compensate for the nonlinear effect in the SiPM-based visible light communication (VLC) system. Experiments of a 100–300 Mbaud PAM-8 VLC system show that the proposed ATNLE outperforms conventional feedforward equalizer, diagonally-pruned volterra nonlinear equalizer (DP- VNLE), and memory polynomial equalizer (MPE), while exhibiting a low complexity comparable to the MPE.