SUMMARYThis work shows that the performance of optical receivers designed in silicon deep-sub-micron CMOS technologies competes successfully with more expensive SiGe-BiCMOS receivers in data rate and sensitivity. In burst-mode applications of passive optical networks, the transimpedance of the low-noise amplifier has to be switched very fast requiring, the exclusion of oscillations. To meet the burst-mode requirements, our design for 2.5 G bit/s in 120 nm CMOS offers a fast switching of the transimpedance within 3 ns and proves a low-distortion signal detection.