TY - JOUR N1 - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions. TI - Enhancing the Vertical Resolution of Coherent Optical Receivers AV - public SP - 1 Y1 - 2025/// EP - 8 JF - Journal of Lightwave Technology A1 - Barbosa, FA A1 - Ferreira, FM KW - Optical communications KW - coherent detection KW - digital-to-analog converter KW - analog-to-digital converter KW - effective number of bits N2 - The constantly increasing capacity demand in optical fiber transmission systems has driven the development of higher-order modulation to share the cost and power-consumption of optoelectronic components across many bits. However, higher-order modulation imposes challenging requirements on high-speed optoelectronic transceiver components such as on the vertical resolution of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. State-of-the-art high-speed converters limit the development of next-generation systems above 6 bit/s/Hz/pol at symbol rates beyond 100 Gbaud for Nyquist shaped channels. Ultimately, in the absence of fiber nonlinearity the upper limit on the available signal-to-noise ratio is bounded by the transceiver subsystems. Here we propose a novel optoelectronic technique to enhance the effective vertical resolution of coherent receivers through optical intensity reshaping. Finally, we show that the proposed technique to increase the effective resolution will also boost the performance of digital backpropagation used to mitigate fiber Kerr nonlinear response. ID - discovery10204393 PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) UR - https://doi.org/10.1109/jlt.2024.3521296 SN - 0733-8724 ER -