Design of high-voltage electronic driver for polarization encoding quantum transmitters
Costa, H.
;
Prata, J.
;
Pinto, A. N.
; Muga, N. J.
Design of high-voltage electronic driver for polarization encoding quantum transmitters, Proc International Conf. on Transparent Optical Networks - ICTON, Barcelona, Spain, Vol. , pp. - , July, 2025.
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Abstract
Abstract—We present the design and experimental implementation of a compact high-voltage driver tailored for multi-wave-plate electro-optical polarization controllers (EPC) in polarization-based DV-QKD subsystems. The driver is capable of deriving a 140Vpp output swing per wave-plate, supports modulation bandwidths up to 7.5 MHz, with 10mV resolution, and incorporates per-channel ADC monitoring for real-time feedback. A two-stage architecture, with a low-voltage pre-amplification stage followed by a high-voltage output stage, is used with the input being provided by a 16-channel FMC216 DAC board, connected to Xilinx Zynq FPGA. Electrical characterization shows that both rise times (~30 ns) and the maximum stable square-wave frequency up to 7.5 MHz improve as the input Vpp increases, with output gain scaling linearly with input amplitude. Optical testing
demonstrates reliable polarization state stability and speed. By enabling fast, precise State of Polarization (SOP) control without bulky stabilization hardware, our driver significantly simplifies the design of polarization-encoded QKD transmitters and receivers, paving the way toward cost-effective, high-rate quantum communications.
