Patent ID: 8526823

Claim:
An optical transceiver system that uses digital signal processing to process a data stream sent through a fiber optical channel to modify an optical receiver of the optical transceiver system capabilities both to achieve the a predetermined end-to-end bit error rate while to altering power dissipation in the optical receiver to that sufficient to meet said end-to-end bit error rate, the optical transceiver system comprising: an optical transmitter; and the optical receiver, the optical receiver comprising digital logic; and a controller in electrical communication with the optical receiver, wherein the controller controls either, the bypassing of portions of the digital logic, or at least reduction of one of the value of power to, parameters of or clock to portions of the digital logic, so as to reduce power dissipation in the optical receiver while meeting the end-to-end bit error rate, wherein a portion of the digital logic is an adaptive equalizer module and the adaptive equalizer module can simultaneously perform both polarization mode dispersion equalization and chromatic dispersion compensation and wherein the chromatic dispersion compensation function is reduced so as to save power when the chromatic dispersion compensation is small enough such that it can be compensated by the PMD block alone.