In this work, we demonstrate the offline FPGA realization of both recurrent and feedforward neural network (NN)-based equalizers for nonlinearity compensation in coherent optical transmission systems. First, we present a realization pipeline showing the conversion of the models from Python libraries to the FPGA chip synthesis and implementation. Then, we review the main alternatives for the hardware implementation of nonlinear activation functions. The main results are divided into three parts: a performance comparison, an analysis of how activation functions are implemented, and a report on the complexity of the hardware. The performance in Q-factor is presented for the cases of bidirectional long-short-term memory coupled with convolutional NN (biLSTM + CNN) equalizer, CNN equalizer, and standard 1-StpS digital back-propagation (DBP) for the simulation and experiment propagation of a single channel dual-polarization (SC-DP) 16QAM at 34 GBd along 17x70km of LEAF. The biLSTM+CNN equalizer provides a similar result to DBP and a 1.7 dB Q-factor gain compared with the chromatic dispersion compensation baseline in the experimental dataset. After that, we assess the Q-factor and the impact of hardware utilization when approximating the activation functions of NN using Taylor series, piecewise linear, and look-up table (LUT) approximations. We also show how to mitigate the approximation errors with extra training and provide some insights into possible gradient problems in the LUT approximation. Finally, to evaluate the complexity of hardware implementation to achieve 400G throughput, fixed-point NN-based equalizers with approximated activation functions are developed and implemented in an FPGA.

To circumvent the non-parallelizability of recurrent neural network-based equalizers, we propose knowledge distillation to recast the RNN into a parallelizable feedforward structure. The latter shows 38\% latency decrease, while impacting the Q-factor by only 0.5dB.

在本文中，我们提供了一种系统的方法来评估和比较数字信号处理中神经网络层的计算复杂性。我们提供并链接四个软件到硬件的复杂性度量，定义了不同的复杂度指标与层的超参数的关系。本文解释了如何计算这四个指标以进行馈送和经常性层，并定义在这种情况下，我们应该根据我们是否表征了面向更软件或硬件的应用程序来使用特定的度量。新引入的四个指标之一，称为“添加和位移位数（NAB）”，用于异质量化。 NABS不仅表征了操作中使用的位宽的影响，还表征了算术操作中使用的量化类型。我们打算这项工作作为与神经网络在实时数字信号处理中应用相关的复杂性估计级别（目的）的基线，旨在统一计算复杂性估计。