K-Means Assisted Soft Decision of PAM4 to Mitigate Level Nonlinearity and Level-Dependent Noise for VCSEL-Based 100-Gbps 100-m MMF Optical Interconnection

A likelihood ratio estimation method based on K-means clustering is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for soft decision of PAM4 to mitigate the level nonlinearity and level-dependent noise. Commercial-VCSEL-based 100-Gbps 100-m MMF optical transmission is achieved.