A 1–13 Gbps tunable optical receiver with supply voltage scaling

Abstract

In this letter, a tunable optical receiver is demonstrated in standard 65-nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology for universal optical interconnects. With supply voltage scaling, a 3-dB bandwidth, a power efficiency, and a noise performance can be optimized according to the target bitrate. The optical receiver including a shunt-feedback transimpedance amplifier and a limiting amplifier has been designed to have the optimum performance in bitrate ranges from 1 Gbps to 13 Gbps while remaining the transimpedance gain and power efficiency. The prototype chip exhibits −24.2 dBm to −16.8 dBm of optical sensitivity for 10 −12 bit error rate and its power efficiency is less than 5 pJ/bit for all operating frequency range.