Digital timing recovery combined with adaptive equalization for optical coherent receivers

We propose a novel equalization and timing recovery scheme, which adds an adaptive butterfly-structured equalizer in an all-digital timing recovery loop, for polarization multiplexing (POLMUX) coherent receivers. It resolves an incompatible problem that digital equalizer requires the timing recovered (synchronous) signal and Gardner timing-error detection algorithm requires the equalized signal because of its small tolerance on dispersion. This joint module can complete synchronization, equalization and polarization de-multiplexing simultaneously without any extra computational cost. Finally, we demonstrate the good performance of the new scheme in a 112-Gbit/s POLMUX-NRZ-DQPSK digital optical coherent receiver.