Cost-effective and robust DSP scheme for a short-reach coherent system in the presence of transmitter IQ skew and chromatic dispersion

A cost-effective and robust digital signal processing (DSP) scheme is proposed and demonstrated experimentally in a coherent 61 GBaud PDM 16QAM system. In our scheme, multi-stage DSP blocks are used to deal with channel effects, transceiver in-phase and quadrature (IQ) skew, and phase noise. A 4x4 real-valued multiple-input multiple-output (RV-MIMO) with N1 taps is for polarization recovery and receiver IQ skew calibration. After frequency offset compensation, two 2x2 RV-MIMO with N2 taps are used to compensate for chromatic dispersion (CD), inter-symbol interference, transmitter IQ skew, and phase noise. Finally, the residual phase noise is eliminated by the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme provides better received optical power sensitivity and CD tolerance than the existing simplified DSP schemes. In addition, the proposed scheme can tolerate transmitter IQ skew up to 7 ps in a 10 km case, which outperforms both simplified and conventional DSP schemes. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme can keep the same transceiver IQ skew andCDtolerance and has reduced complexity by 25% after 10 km links, compared to 4x4 RV-MIMO followed by a transmitter skew compensator. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed scheme is the most cost-effective solution for a high baud rate datacenter interconnects where transmitter IQ skew and CD have to be dealt with.