The emergence of new applications is driving a dramatic growth in the capacity of data center interconnects. Intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) has the characteristics of low cost, low power consumption and a small footprint. Industry and academia have conducted much research on IM/DD systems as a cost-effective solution. However, optical/electronic bandwidth and fiber dispersion are the restricting factors for the improvement of transmission capacity. Pattern-dependent distortion is an important aspect that affects system performance. In this paper, we propose a look-up table (LUT)-based direct-detection-faster-than-Nyquist (DDFTN) algorithm to compensate for pattern-dependent distortion. The performances of feedforward-equalization (FFE) only, the original DDFTN, least-squares (LS)-based DDFTN, and LUT-based DDFTN algorithms in IM/DD-based 112/140 Gbit/s four-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) signal transmission were evaluated. The experimental results indicate that LUT-based DDFTN performs better with low computational complexity.
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