Symbol Rate-Code Rate Trade-offs for IM/DD 200G/400G per Lane LPO Transceivers

Abstract

We analyze the symbol rate-code rate trade-off in bandwidth-limited IM/DD systems targeting LPO transceivers, using PAM-4/6/8 as candidate modulation formats. We use the capacity of the binary symmetric channel as an achievable information rate under hard-decision decoding, serving as a performance metric for 200G and 400G per-lane throughput targets. Our results show that reducing the FEC code rate below the KP4 baseline allows higher-order PAM formats to operate at substantially lower symbol rates than PAM-4 while meeting the throughput requirement.