Single Carrier 168 Gb/s PAM8 over 80 km Below HD-FEC Using Simple Receiver Equalization for Data Centre Interconnects

We demonstrate the first single carrier, single polarization PAM8 intensity modulation direct detection system delivering 168 Gb/s over 80km of SMF below the hard-decision FEC threshold of 3.8×10−'3, with a receiver processing relying only on a 3-tap FFE