Joint clock recovery and feed-forward equalization for PAM4 transmission.

With the rapid development of cloud services, data-center applications and the Internet of Things, short-reach communications have attracted much more attention in recent years. 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) is a promising modulation format to provide both high data rate and relatively low cost for short-reach optical interconnects. In this paper, a joint clock recovery and feed-forward equalization algorithm (CR-FFE) is proposed to simultaneously eliminate the inter-symbol interference (ISI) and track large sampling clock offset (SCO) in PAM4 transmission.