An optical transceiver includes N transmitters each transmitting one of N transmitted optically bound channels; a clock forwarding mechanism to transmit a transmitted optical clock signal to an opposing optical receiver; N receivers each receiving one of N received optically bound channels; and a clock recovery mechanism to receive a received optical clock signal from the opposing optical transmitter. A method and photonically integrated system are also disclosed. The optical transceiver, method, and system optimize system design of WDM highly parallelized transceivers with optical bound channels, a simplified clocking architecture, and boosted receiver sensitivity. The optical transceiver, method, and system include clock recovery followed by data recovery and can utilize integrate-and-dump optical receivers with a recovered clock.