84-, 100-, and 107-GBd PAM-4 Intensity-Modulation Direct-Detection Transceiver for Datacenter Interconnects

We report on an ultrahigh-speed PAM-based IM/DD optical subsystem featuring compact signal generation and tractable digital-processing complexity. The proposed transceiver is based on two main technologies: an InP DHBT selector power DAC for electrical signal generation, and a complexity-optimized receiver processing chain. We show how the complexity of the feed-forward equalizer can be considerably reduced by stacking a <;3-symbol memory sequence estimator. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate successful signal recovery for 107-GBd PAM-4 in back-to-back configuration, and after 500 m and 1 km of transmission over standard single-mode fiber for 100- and 84-GBd PAM-4 configuration, respectively. A power-budget margin above 2 dB is attained in all cases.