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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Masaad, Sarah, Declercq, Jakob, Sackesyn, Stijn, Van Assche, Ruben, Salmanian, Hasan, Polatynski, Andrzej, Chatzitheocharis, Dimitrios, Vyrsokinos, Konstantinos, Buriakova, Tatiana, Caillaud, Christophe, Sygletos, Stylianos, Yin, Xin, Bienstman, Peter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20504
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Table of Contents:
  • Intensity-modulation direct-detection links must support increasing baudrates and transmission distances while operating under stringent power and cost constraints. However, as data rates and reaches increase, chromatic dispersion induces stronger inter-symbol interference and, after direct detection, frequency-selective fading, thus requiring increasingly powerful equalization. In conventional receivers, this translates into digital equalization whose complexity scales unfavorably with data rate. Photonic-domain equalization offers a hardware-based alternative that operates naturally at line rate and mitigates frequency fading. However, prior demonstrations were not readily adaptable for different rate and/or reach operation. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate all-optical equalization across 10-46 Gbaud and 10-250 km SSMF in the C-band enabled solely through retraining of the readout layer, achieving up to four orders of magnitude BER improvement over standard DSP equalization. The demonstrator comprises a 16-node spatially multiplexed reservoir, programmable on-chip readout, and co-packaged receiver front-end. To our knowledge, this is the first co-packaged photonic reservoir receiver and the first demonstration of simultaneous baudrate- and reach-flexible equalization using a fixed-topology integrated photonic circuit.