Performance Optimization of Short Reach Optical Interconnects based on Direct Detection

Short-reach optical interconnects are evolving toward data rates beyond 400 Gb/s per lane, driven by the bandwidth and energy-efficiency requirements of AI-enabled datacenter networks. At these operating speeds, channel impairments, device nonlinearities, and hardware constraints limit the effectiveness of conventional transceiver design and digital signal processing (DSP). This paper presents a unified framework for the optimization of direct-detection optical interconnects, encompassing digital surrogate modeling, receiver-side DSP optimization, and end-to-end (E2E) transceiver learning. The proposed formulation provides a common perspective for model-based and machine-learning-based approaches, including linear and nonlinear equalization, lookup tables, decision trees, neural-network receivers, and E2E optimization. Their performance is discussed together with computational complexity and hardware implementation aspects, highlighting the associated trade-offs. We show, through simulations and experimental validations, that for a 40~Gb/s 10~km link, decision trees can outperform by 0.5--1~dB conventional linear equalization, with negligible hardware requirements. Moreover, we show that an E2E technique based on transformers can provide a gain up to 6~dB, highlighting the potential of joint transceiver optimization to improve the performance of next-generation short-reach optical links.