A 56 Gbaud Reconfigurable FPGA Feed-Forward Equalizer for Optical Datacenter Networks with flexible Baudrate- and Modulation-Format

The staggering growth of datacenter traffic has spurred the rapid uptake of advanced modulation-formats to increase throughput. Commodity optoelectronic components are used for cost-efficiency, assisted with digital equalizers to mitigate their bandwidth limitations. With optically-switched datacenter architectures gaining momentum, reconfigurable equalizers are sought allowing the receiver to adapt to different fiber lengths, bitrates and modulation-formats associated to different optical paths. An FPGA-based feed-forward equalizer (FFE) reconfigurable in baudrate and modulation-format is demonstrated. We verify its performance with NRZ and PAM-4 experimental data up to 56 GBaud, investigate its accuracy and extract the optimum FFE implementation for different transmission scenarios