LabVIEW design for electronic control interface of photonic integrated circuit

• Main Author: Ng, Ee Xian
• Other Authors: Liu Ai Qun
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/157708
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This project aims to achieve the calibration and feedback control of the electronic polarization controller (EPC). Two methods were explored – a manual method that switches between 2 programs; One program, using simulated annealing to find the voltage for minimum optical output power for an individual channel, another program to generate the minimum power from the 4 channels’ voltages obtained from the first program. Another method is an automatic program to find the voltages of all 4 channels that leads to minimum optical output power from the EPC. Results from the calibration is collected and the polarization extinction rate is calculated to determine the efficacy of the 2 methods. A feedback control using simulated annealing is also implemented to stabilise and correct fluctuations in the EPC’s optical output signal. This is so that during transmission from the EPC to the receiver, the output signal does not alter due to environmental conditions such as changes in the room temperature and tension in the fiber optic cable. This project also aims to achieve the calibration of a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI). A program is built to do voltage scanning of a MZI by injecting increasing voltage from 0V to 5V, in steps of 0.1V. The optical output power from the MZI is measured and a curve fitting will be performed on this data to determine the voltages where maximum and minimum power occurs. Once the 2 voltages are obtained, the MZI can be controlled to freely change between cross and bar states.