---
title: "PAM4 at 800G: Why FEC Errors Spike at Peak Traffic Hours"
type: technology_deep_dive
target_audience: technical
score: 9/10
---

The correlation between peak traffic load and FEC error rate increases at 800G is not intuitive because FEC errors are an optical and electrical signal integrity phenomenon, not a traffic volume phenomenon. Traffic volume itself cannot directly degrade an optical signal — photons do not care how many frames per second they carry. What traffic volume does do is generate heat inside the module, inside the ASIC, and inside the optical cage, and heat is the mechanism that closes the PAM4 eye diagram and drives pre-FEC BER upward. Understanding this chain — sustained utilization to thermal buildup to SNR degradation to FEC error increase — is the difference between a network operations team that watches FEC counters spike at 18:00 every business day and treats it as background noise, and one that understands it as a system operating at its thermal margin and heading toward a link failure event at the next thermal peak.

PAM4 modulation encodes two bits per symbol by using four discrete amplitude levels rather than the two levels of NRZ signaling. The signal-to-noise ratio requirement to reliably distinguish four amplitude levels is substantially higher than for two levels. At 800G with 106.25 Gbaud PAM4 on eight lanes, the vertical eye opening for each amplitude transition — the gap between adjacent signal levels — is approximately one-third the vertical eye opening of the equivalent NRZ signal at the same baud rate. This reduced eye opening is why the theoretical pre-FEC BER of PAM4 is higher than NRZ at the same optical power level. The IEEE 802.3df specification for 800GBASE-SR8 specifies a pre-FEC BER threshold of 2.4e-4 per lane under the RS(544,514) FEC scheme. That is not a floor — it is the maximum allowable pre-FEC BER at which the FEC scheme can reliably correct errors and deliver post-FEC BER below 1e-12. Operating near that threshold provides no margin.

The thermal mechanism works as follows. At 800G, each OSFP module is drawing between 9 and 20 watts depending on variant, and the ASIC ports driving those modules are adding additional heat to the PCIe card zone of the chassis. At 40 percent average utilization during business hours, the PCB temperature in the optical cage area is in a stable regime. As utilization climbs toward 70 to 75 percent during peak hours — a common evening peak for backbone and peering ports — the sustained electrical activity in the SerDes lanes, the ASIC forwarding elements, and the laser drivers increases heat generation. The module die temperature rises. On a QSFP-DD or OSFP module, the DOM temperature register captures this, and a module that showed 52°C at 40 percent utilization will often read 60 to 64°C at sustained 70 to 75 percent utilization in a chassis where the cage cooling is designed for average rather than peak loading.

The temperature increase of 8 to 12°C above average-load operating temperature has a direct effect on the optical transmitter's characteristics. In EML transmitters used in DR8 and FR8 variants, a 10°C rise reduces the extinction ratio by approximately 0.5 to 1.0 dB due to increased transparency current and altered chirp characteristics. In VCSEL arrays used in SR8 variants, a 10°C rise increases threshold current by 5 to 10 percent and reduces differential efficiency by a similar fraction, requiring the APC loop to increase bias current to compensate. If the APC loop is at or near its ceiling, the compensation is incomplete and TX power drops, reducing the received optical power and pushing the receiver's decision circuit toward the noise floor. The result is increasing symbol errors on the affected lanes, captured as rising pre-FEC BER.

Pre-FEC BER versus post-FEC BER tell different stories about the same link condition and should be read in conjunction, not in isolation. Post-FEC BER is what the traffic experiences — if RS-FEC is correctly correcting all symbol errors, post-FEC BER is zero and no frames are dropped. This causes the common misdiagnosis of "the link is fine because we're not dropping frames." Pre-FEC BER is what the physical layer is experiencing before correction, and it tells you how much of the FEC budget you are consuming. A pre-FEC BER of 1.0e-4 is consuming 42 percent of the RS(544,514) FEC correction capacity. A pre-FEC BER of 2.0e-4 is consuming 83 percent. A pre-FEC BER of 2.4e-4 is at the correction limit, and any transient that pushes it momentarily higher — a brief thermal spike, a vibration event, a voltage transient — produces a burst of uncorrectable errors and potentially a link down. The post-FEC counter shows nothing until the moment it shows everything.

The pre-FEC BER threshold that predicts imminent link failure is platform-specific, but a general operational rule is that sustained pre-FEC BER above 1.5e-4 during peak load on a link that reads below 5e-6 during low load represents a link that is thermally marginal and will fail within weeks to months under continued peak loading and normal environmental variation. The asymmetry between low-load and peak-load pre-FEC BER is itself diagnostic: a large ratio (more than two orders of magnitude difference) confirms the thermal mechanism rather than a persistent optical path degradation, which would show elevated pre-FEC BER continuously rather than only at peak load.

Operational changes that reduce peak-load thermal stress without hardware replacement fall into two categories. Chassis airflow management — cleaning filters, ensuring proper blanking panel installation so air does not bypass the modules, verifying that cable management does not impede cage-face airflow — can reduce module operating temperature by 3 to 7°C at peak load. On many Arista 7800 and Cisco NX-9500 series chassis, the fan speed control algorithm increases fan RPM in response to inlet temperature rather than in response to optical module die temperature directly, which means the fans may not ramp to their maximum speed until the inlet temperature rises, by which time the module die temperature has already spiked. Some platforms allow configuring a lower temperature threshold for fan speed increase, which reduces peak module temperature at the cost of approximately 3 to 8 percent higher steady-state fan power.

Traffic engineering — specifically, load-balancing policies that limit any individual 800G link to a maximum sustained utilization of 65 to 70 percent rather than allowing 80 to 85 percent — provides margin that the thermal control system cannot. This is a ECMP hashing or traffic policy configuration change with no hardware cost, and it is the most immediate intervention when a link is showing pre-FEC BER degradation at peak load. The objection that limiting link utilization "wastes" capacity is based on treating the link's data sheet maximum as the correct operating point, which it is not — the data sheet maximum is the specification limit, not the continuous operating point for a system that needs to remain healthy for a seven-year infrastructure lifecycle.

For links where thermal-marginal pre-FEC behavior persists after chassis airflow optimization and utilization policy changes, the root cause is typically that the chassis cooling system was not designed with 800G power density in mind. A 32-port OSFP 800G chassis running SR8 modules draws approximately 350 to 400 watts from optical modules alone at full utilization, in addition to the ASIC power. Older chassis designed for 100G or first-generation 400G traffic densities may not have the per-port cooling capacity for sustained 800G thermal loads. This is a platform refresh consideration, not a transceiver problem — but the pre-FEC BER data is what surfaces the constraint.
