High capacity coherent optical transceiver for short reach applications

An optical transceiver, comprising:

• a transmitter comprising transmitter signal processing circuitry configured to receive a transmit signal and provide two drive voltage signals V1, V2 to a modulator configured to modulate a laser based thereon;
• and
• a receiver comprising i) optical couplers configured to coherently combine received signals with a Local Oscillator (LO) formed by the laser and provide the combined signals to photodetectors for balanced detection, and ii) receiver signal processing circuitry configured to demodulate outputs from the balanced detection, wherein the receiver signal processing circuitry comprises an analog front-end and digital back-end,
• wherein the analog front-end comprises Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters for partial compensation of chromatic dispersion compensation, in combination with the transmitter signal processing circuitry of an adjacent optical transceiver.