Optical interconnects (OIs) based on vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) are the main workhorse within data centers, supercomputers, and even vehicles, providing low-cost, high-rate connectivity. VCSELs must operate under extremely harsh and time-varying conditions, thus requiring adaptive and flexible designs of the communication chain. Such designs can be built based on mathematical models (model-based design) or learned from data (machine learning (ML) based design). Various ML techniques have recently come to the forefront, replacing individual components in the transmitters and receivers with deep neural networks. Beyond such component-wise learning, end-to-end (E2E) autoencoder approaches can reach the ultimate performance through co-optimizing entire parameterized transmitters and receivers. This tutorial paper aims to provide an overview of ML for VCSEL-based OIs, with a focus on E2E approaches, dealing specifically with the unique challenges facing VCSELs, such as the wide temperature variations and complex models.
@article{arxiv.2211.14481,
title = {End-to-End Learning for VCSEL-based Optical Interconnects: State-of-the-Art, Challenges, and Opportunities},
author = {Muralikrishnan Srinivasan and Jinxiang Song and Alexander Grabowski and Krzysztof Szczerba and Holger K. Iversen and Mikkel N. Schmidt and Darko Zibar and Jochen Schröder and Anders Larsson and Christian Häger and Henk Wymeersch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.14481},
year = {2023}
}