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The performance of a high-speed intensity-modulation (IM)/direct-detection (DD) transmission system could be limited by the bandwidth of optical transceivers. One popular way to cope with this performance limitation is to utilize the maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) at the receiver. However, a practical problem of MLSE is its high implementation complexity. Even though the channel impulse response can be truncated by using a two-tap filter before applying the MLSE, it still faces an implementation problem when used for multi-level modulation formats. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a reduced-state MLSE for band-limited IM/DD transmission systems using M-ary pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-M) formats. We use a conventional Viterbi algorithm to search a reduced-state trellis, which is constructed by using the coarse pre-decision of the signal equalized by a feed-forward equalizer. Thus, the proposed MLSE reduces the implementation complexity significantly. We evaluate the performance of the proposed reduced-state MLSE over 100∼140-Gb/s PAM-4/6/8 transmission systems implemented by using a 1.3-µm directly modulated laser. The results show that the proposed MLSE achieves almost the same performance as the conventional MLSE but reduces the implementation complexity by a factor of 4∼10 when the complexity is assessed by the number of multiplications and additions.

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The intensity-modulation/direct-detection transmission system operating in the C-band suffers from nonlinear waveform distortions induced by fiber chromatic dispersion due to the square-law detection. The Volterra nonlinear equalizers (VNLEs) can be used at the receiver to compensate for such distortions. However, the major concern about the equalizers is their huge implementation complexity. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a low-complexity nonlinear equalizer based on the absolute operation for a cost-sensitive IM/DD system. In this equalizer, the cross-beating product terms (required in VNLE) are replaced with the absolute operation of the sum of two input samples. We evaluate the performance of the proposed equalizer over a 56-Gb/s 4-ary pulse amplitude modulation transmission system implemented by using 1.5-µm directly modulated laser or electro-absorption modulated laser. The results show that the proposed equalizer performs similar to the 2nd-order diagonally-pruned VNLE, but lowers the implementation complexity by >20%. We also show that the proposed equalizer outperforms the VNLE when the implementation complexities of the two nonlinear equalizers are similar.

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