Optical receiver with three data slicers and one edge slicer

Abstract

An example optical receiver may have an optical receiver front-end, four slicers, and a logic block. The optical receiver front-end may include a transimpedance amplifier to convert a photodiode output signal to a voltage signal. Three of the slicers may be data slicers, and one of the slicers may be an edge slicer. The slicers may each: shift the voltage signal based on an offset voltage set for the respective slicer, determine whether the shifted voltage signal is greater than a threshold value and generate a number of comparison signals based on the determining, and generate multiple digital signals by demuxing the comparison signals. The logic block may perform PAM-4 to binary decoding based on the data signals output by the data slicers and clock-and-data-recovery based on the digital signals output by the edge slicer.