Future wire-line communication-systems require data-rates >224Gbit/s. In this paper, a 112Gbaud transmitter and receiver front-end including the 112GS/s sampler are designed in 22FDX meeting >56 GHz bandwidth demands. A Transmitter SNDR >39dB and a receiver SNDR > 37dB is achieved, excluding jitter, requiring only 191mW from a 1.4/0.9V supply. The circuit step-responses are inserted into a co-packaged optical-link PAM-4 224Gbit/s simulator including: transmitter, substrate-channels (including NEXT/FEXT), driver, optical-channels, photo-diode, TIA, and receiver/DSP equalization to verify the system SNR/SER. A Channel of up to 25dB attenuation at Nyquist is utilized, demanding 32-tap FFE and 1-tap MLSE equalization, for an FEC limit of 10−3.