A 25Gb/s 170μW/Gb/s optical receiver in 28nm CMOS for chip-to-chip optical communication

Abstract

A low-power high-speed optical receiver in 28nm CMOS is presented. The design features a novel architecture combining a low-bandwidth TIA front-end, double-sampling technique and dynamic offset modulation. The low-bandwidth TIA increases receiver's sensitivity while adding minimal power overhead. Functionality of the receiver was validated and the design is compared with a conventional 3-stage TIA receiver via actual measurements. The proposed receiver architecture achieves error-free operation (BER<;10^(-12)) at 25Gb/s with energy efficiency of 170fJ/b while the conventional receiver achieves error-free operation at 17.1Gb/s with energy efficiency of 260fJ/b.

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