Architecture and Experimental Evaluation of a 10Gb/s MLSD-Based Transceiver for Multimode Optical Fibers

In this paper, the authors present the architecture and experimental evaluation of a single-chip CMOS Maximum-Likelihood Sequence Detection (MLSD) transceiver for Electronic Dispersion Compensation (EDC) of Multi-Mode optical Fibers (MMF) at 10Gb/s data rate. The primary application of this transceiver is the 10GBASE-LRM standard for 10Gb/s Ethernet over MMF. Application to Single-Mode Fiber (SMF) channels and/or other standards is also possible. Both optical module and line card applications are discussed. The architecture of the receiver is discussed in considerable depth, including implementation details. Extensive experimental results on several channels are presented.