Disclosed is a feed forward clock and data recovery unit for recovering a received serial data bit stream having a feed forward phase tracking unit for tracking of a sampling time to the center of a unit interval of the received data bit stream. The feed forward phase tracking unit can include a sampling phase generation unit, an oversampling unit, a serial-to-parallel-conversion unit, a binary phase detection unit, a loop filter, a finite state machine, a binary rotator, and a data recognition unit for recovery of the received data stream which includes a number of parallel data recognition FIR-Filters. Further, each data recognition FIR-Filter can include a weighting unit for weighting data samples of the deserialized data stream, a summing unit for summing up the weighted data samples, and a comparator unit for comparing the summed up data samples with a threshold value.