A monolithic optoelectronic receiver in standard 0.7-μm CMOS operating at 180 MHz and 176-fJ light input energy

Synchronous OEIC Integrating Receiver for Optically Reconfigurable Gate Arrays

“…The comparison to other published integrating optical receivers, due to their digital operation, is strongly technology dependent in terms of speed when scaled to shorter nodes; in particular [ 8 , 9 ], achieve gigabit operation (1 Gbit/s and 1.2 Gbit/s) thanks to their implementation in 250 nm and 90 nm CMOS, whereas [ 12 ] operates at 320 Mbit/s and [ 7 ] at 180 Mbit/s using, respectively, 0.8 μm and 0.7 μm CMOS. In terms of sensitivity, the fabricated prototype achieves a 9.5 dB improvement over [ 8 ], 6.6 dB over [ 9 ], 9.4 dB over [ 12 ] in single-beam operation, and 14 dB over [ 7 ]. For its part, the receiver in [ 6 ] achieves a high −29.0 dBm sensitivity in a 0.35 μm CMOS process, but at a bit rate of just 5 Mbit/s.…”

“…An alternative to TIA-based optical receivers that is gaining attention for communications applications with a tight power budget is the integrating optical receiver. Already introduced for optical memories [ 6 ] or highly parallel optical interconnects [ 7 ], it mainly uses digital circuitry, which results in a drastic reduction in power consumption and makes it compatible with process scaling to achieve higher data rates. Recently reported implementations achieve Gbit/s with energy efficiencies of 0.9 pJ/bit [ 8 ] and 4.5 pJ/bit [ 9 ].…”

Speed and energy analysis of digital interconnections: comparison of on-chip, off-chip, and free-space technologies

“…For the optical interconnections we assume that the light transmitters ͑MQW modulators or VCSEL's͒ are flip-chip bonded to silicon and that integrated reverse-biased silicon p-n junctions are used as photodiodes. Note that standard silicon p-n diodes are speed limited 11 well below 1 GHz but that other types of faster detectors ͑e.g., hybridized MQW p-i-n diodes or GaAs metal-semiconductor-metal de-tectors͒ could be used for the high-speed rates. ͑Interestingly enough, MQW p-i-n diodes have similar parasitics, although they do exhibit better responsivity than silicon p-n diodes of similar dimensions even when accounting for the hybrid integration.͒ A10.…”