Reducing the impact of non-ideal PRBS on microwave photonic random demodulators by low biasing the optical modulator via PRBS amplitude compression

A novel method for reducing the impact of non-ideal pseudo-random binary sequence (PRBS) on microwave photonic random demodulators (RDs) in a photonics-assisted compressed sensing (CS) system is proposed. Different from the commonly used method that switches the bias point of the optical modulator in the RD between two quadrature transmission points to mix the signal to be sampled and the PRBS, this method employs a PRBS with lower amplitude to low bias the optical modulator so that the impact of non-ideal PRBS on microwave photonic RDs can be greatly reduced by compressing the amplitude of non-ideal parts of the PRBS. An experiment is performed to verify the concept. The optical modulator is properly low-biased via PRBS amplitude compression. The data rate and occupied bandwidth of the PRBS are 500 Mb/s and 1 GHz, while the multi-tone signals with a maximum frequency of 100 MHz are sampled at an equivalent sampling rate of only 50 MSa/s. The results show that the reconstruction error can be reduced by up to 85%. The proposed method can significantly reduce the requirements for PRBS in RD-based photonics-assisted CS systems, providing a feasible solution for reducing the complexity and cost of system implementation.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

A review of advances in pixel detectors for experiments with high rate and radiation

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments ATLAS and CMS have established hybrid pixel detectors as the instrument of choice for particle tracking and vertexing in high rate and radiation environments, as they operate close to the LHC interaction points. With the High Luminosity-LHC upgrade now in sight, for which the tracking detectors will be completely replaced, new generations of pixel detectors are being devised. They have to address enormous challenges in terms of data throughput and radiation levels, ionizing and non-ionizing, that harm the sensing and readout parts of pixel detectors alike. Advances in microelectronics and microprocessing technologies now enable large scale detector designs with unprecedented performance in measurement precision (space and time), radiation hard sensors and readout chips, hybridization techniques, lightweight supports, and fully monolithic approaches to meet these challenges. This paper reviews the world-wide effort on these developments.Comment: 84 pages with 46 figures. Review article.For submission to Rep. Prog. Phy

On Unlimited Sampling

Shannon's sampling theorem provides a link between the continuous and the discrete realms stating that bandlimited signals are uniquely determined by its values on a discrete set. This theorem is realized in practice using so called analog--to--digital converters (ADCs). Unlike Shannon's sampling theorem, the ADCs are limited in dynamic range. Whenever a signal exceeds some preset threshold, the ADC saturates, resulting in aliasing due to clipping. The goal of this paper is to analyze an alternative approach that does not suffer from these problems. Our work is based on recent developments in ADC design, which allow for ADCs that reset rather than to saturate, thus producing modulo samples. An open problem that remains is: Given such modulo samples of a bandlimited function as well as the dynamic range of the ADC, how can the original signal be recovered and what are the sufficient conditions that guarantee perfect recovery? In this paper, we prove such sufficiency conditions and complement them with a stable recovery algorithm. Our results are not limited to certain amplitude ranges, in fact even the same circuit architecture allows for the recovery of arbitrary large amplitudes as long as some estimate of the signal norm is available when recovering. Numerical experiments that corroborate our theory indeed show that it is possible to perfectly recover function that takes values that are orders of magnitude higher than the ADC's threshold.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, copy of initial version to appear in Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Sampling Theory and Applications (SampTA

Compressed sensing with continuous parametric reconstruction

This work presents a novel unconventional method of signal reconstruction after compressive sensing. Instead of usual matrices, continuous models are used to describe both the sampling process and acquired signal. Reconstruction is performed by finding suitable values of model parameters in order to obtain the most probable fit. A continuous approach allows more precise modelling of physical sampling circuitry and signal reconstruction at arbitrary sampling rate. Application of this method is demonstrated using a wireless sensor network used for freshwater quality monitoring. Results show that the proposed method is more robust and offers stable performance when the samples are noisy or otherwise distorted

Spatially Coupled Codes and Optical Fiber Communications: An Ideal Match?

In this paper, we highlight the class of spatially coupled codes and discuss their applicability to long-haul and submarine optical communication systems. We first demonstrate how to optimize irregular spatially coupled LDPC codes for their use in optical communications with limited decoding hardware complexity and then present simulation results with an FPGA-based decoder where we show that very low error rates can be achieved and that conventional block-based LDPC codes can be outperformed. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the combination of spatially coupled LDPC codes with different demodulators and detectors, important for future systems with adaptive modulation and for varying channel characteristics. We demonstrate that SC codes can be employed as universal, channel-agnostic coding schemes.Comment: Invited paper to be presented in the special session on "Signal Processing, Coding, and Information Theory for Optical Communications" at IEEE SPAWC 201