Hui, RongqingCrifasi, Adam Vincenzo2013-09-292013-09-292013-08-312013http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:12909https://hdl.handle.net/1808/12185I investigate an optical Nyquist-WDM Bit Error Rate (BER) detection system. A transmitter and receiver system is simulated, using Matlab and Simulink, to form a working algorithm and to study the effects of the different processes of the data chain. The inherent lack of phase information in the N-WDM scheme presents unique challenges and requires a precise phase recovery system to accurately decode a message. Furthermore, resource constraints are applied by a cost-effective Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). To compensate for the speed, gate, and memory constraints of a budget FPGA, several techniques are employed to design the best possible receiver. I study the resource intensive operations and vary their resource utilization to discover the effect on the BER. To conclude, a full VHDL design is delineated, including peripheral initialization, input data sorting and storage, timing synchronization, state machine and control signal implementation, N-WDM demodulation, phase recovery, QAM decoding, and BER calculation.144 pagesenThis item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.Electrical engineeringDigital subcarrier multiplexingFiber optic communicationsNyquist-wdmThesisopenAccess