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Published May 2012 | public
Book Section - Chapter

Ultra Low-Power Receiver Design for Dense Optical Interconnects

Abstract

With the increasing bandwidth requirements of computing systems and limitations on power consumption, optical signaling for chip-to-chip interconnects has gained a lot of interest. Hybrid integration of optical devices with electronics has been demonstrated to achieve high performance [1]-[4], and recent advances in silicon photonics have led to fully integrated systems [5]. 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 bandwidth 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 has been designed to explore the potential of optical signaling for future chip-to-chip and on-chip communication. In most optical receivers, the photodiode current is converted to a voltage signal. A simple resistor can perform the I-V conversion if the resulting RC time constant is in the order of the bit interval (T_b) [5]. However, for a given photodiode capacitance and target SNR, the RC limits the bandwidth and hence the data rate. To avoid this problem, TIAs are commonly employed, which are highly analog, power hungry, and do not scale well with technology. One alternative is the integrating front-end to eliminate the need for resistance and breaking the bandwidth trade-off. However, this technique suffers from voltage headroom limitations, and requires short-length DC-balanced inputs [6]. The proposed receiver resolves this problem by employing an integrating RC front-end along with dynamic offset modulation technique that decouple the bandwidth/data-rate and integration/headroom trade-offs [7].

Additional Information

© 2012 IEEE. Date of Current Version: 25 June 2012.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
January 13, 2024