Acreo AB, a Swedish company that provides contract R&D and production resources for innovative products in electronics, optics and communication technology, needed to create a single-carrier-modulation (SCM) transceiver link suitable for 100-Gb/s transmission. System-level development of the SCM transceiver link was modeled within AWR's Visual System Simulator, which allowed Acreo to assess the influence of component performance in the electrical domain, particularly in respect to nonlinearities and noise. The design of component building blocks such as IQ modulators, power combiners and low noise amplifiers in the 65-nm CMOS silicon-on-insulator process was performed at the circuit level. Component performance was then assessed in the VSS software to investigate the suitability of CMOS for next-generation optical networking within the transceiver’s architecture.

"Using VSS software together with MATLAB® to create the RF system model proved to be straightforward," said Lars Pettersson, Research Engineer at Acreo. “Its flexibility, ease-of-use and open platform were very positive features. We gained a thorough understanding of how group delay variations affect performance and were able to optimize the system using this knowledge."

To read the complete Acreo success story, visit http://web.awrcorp.com/content/Downloads/AWR-Acreo-Success-Story.pdf.