Distortion Aware Bandwidth Optimization of PAM4-Based All-Digital Receivers

This paper addresses the challenge of maximizing bandwidth in all-digital receivers (ADR)s by presenting a novel pulse-amplitude modulation 4-level (PAM4)-based solution optimized through spectral behavior analysis. This analysis leads to a novel algorithm that strategically places distortion components to minimize their impact on the received signal, enabling higher-bandwidth reception. The proposed ADR is fully integrated into a single multi-gigabit transceiver (MGT) of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and tested in real-time. The ADR can consistently achieve a received signal bandwidth of 400 MHz, presenting carrier agility from 700 MHz to 7.3 GHz, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art ADR solutions.