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

In this paper we present the architecture and experimental evaluation of a single-chip CMOS maximum-likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) transceiver for electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) of multimode optical fibers (MMF) at 10 Gb/s data rate. The primary application of this transceiver is the 10 GBASE-LRM standard for 10 Gb/s Ethernet over MMF [1]. 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. For the precursor, postcursor, and symmetric stressors specified by the 10 GBASE-LRM standard we demonstrate receiver sensitivities of -14.84 dBm, -14.37 dBm, and -13.68 dBm, respectively, in a line card application with 6 inches of electrical interconnect These sensitivities exceed the requirements of the standard by 8.34 dBo, 7.87 dBo, and 7.68 dBo´, respectively. Measured results on industry defined worst-case fibers and on nonstationary channels such as the dynamic stressor defined by the 10 GBASE-LRM standard are also presented.