An 18.6Gb/s double-sampling receiver in 65nm CMOS for ultra-low-power optical communication

Abstract

Using optics for chip-to-chip interconnects has recently gained a lot of interest. As data rates scale to meet increasing bandwidth requirements, the shortcomings of copper channels are becoming more severe. Hybrid integration of optical devices with electronics has been demonstrated to achieve high performance, and recent advances in silicon photonics have led to fully integrated optical signaling. These approaches pave the way to massively parallel optical communications. Dense arrays of optical detectors require very low-power, sensitive, and compact optical receiver circuits. Existing designs for the input receiver, such as TIA, require large power consumption to achieve high band width and low noise, and can occupy large area due to bandwidth-enhancement inductors. In this work, a compact low-power optical receiver that scales well with technology is designed to explore the potential of optical signaling for future chip-to-chip and on-chip communication.

Additional details