Partial response THP for high-speed PAM-4 transmission

Intensity-modulation direct-detection (IM/DD) pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) signals are promising for high-speed data center networks. However, high-speed PAM-4 signals always are subject to critical impairments due to the bandwidth constraint. In the conventional PAM-4 system, a direct detection-faster than Nyquist (DD-FTN) with high complexity is usually appended to the feed-forward equalizer (FFE) for colored noise suppression to maximize transmission performance. In order to yield a simple PAM-4 scheme with similar performance as that of the DD-FTN, we proposed a nonlinear differential coding-generalized Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (NLDC-GTHP) PAM-4 system. The proposed system consists of a NLDC-GTHP at the transmitter and a simplified two-dimensional constellation distortion (S2DCD) module at the receiver. We experimentally demonstrated the proposed NLDC-GTHP PAM-4 system for 62.5-Gb/s PAM-4 signal transmission over 2-km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) with the 10-dB bandwidth of about 12 GHz. By introducing the NLDC-GTHP and S2DCD, we achieved the similar receiver sensitivity as that of the DD-FTN at the hard-decision forward-error-correction (HD-FEC) bit error rate (BER) threshold, with the decrease of 86% computational complexity.