US Patent 7636525 Signal acquisition in a coherent optical receiver

A method and system for initializing a coherent optical receiver. Upon detection of an optical signal, a multi-bit digital sample stream of the optical signal is digitally processed to initialize each one of a plurality of adaptive control blocks of the coherent optical receiver. The adaptive control blocks include at least a dispersion compensation block and a clock recovery block. The dispersion compensation block is initialized before initializing the clock recovery block.