Data Link Layer Considerations for Future 100 Gbps Terahertz Band Transceivers

Abstract EN

This paper presents a hardware processor for 100 Gbps wireless data link layer.

A serial Reed-Solomon decoder requires a clock of 12.5 GHz to fulfill timings constraints of the transmission.

Receiving a single Ethernet frame on a 100 Gbps physical layer may be faster than accessing DDR3 memory.

Processing so fast streams on a state-of-the-art FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) requires a dedicated approach.

Thus, the paper presents lightweight RS FEC engine, frames fragmentation, aggregation, and a protocol with selective fragment retransmission.

The implemented FPGA demonstrator achieves nearly 120 Gbps and accepts bit error rate (BER) up to 2e-3.

Moreover, redundancy added to the frames is adopted according to the channel BER by a dedicated link adaptation algorithm.

At the end, ASIC synthesis results are presented including detailed statistics of consumed energy per bit.