A Monolithically-Integrated Optical Receiver in Standard 45-nm SOI

作者：Georgas Michael^*; Orcutt Jason; Ram Rajeev J; Stojanovic Vladimir

来源：IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 2012, 47(7): 1693-1702.

DOI：10.1109/JSSC.2012.2191684

• Photonics
• interconnect
• monolithic integration
• SOI
• high-speed I/O
• many-core
• multi-core
• sense-amplifiers
• transimpedance amplifiers
• integrating receivers
• chip-to-chip links

Integrated photonics has emerged as an I/O technology that can meet the throughput demands of future many-core processors. Taking advantage of the low capacitance environment provided by monolithic integration, we developed an integrating receiver front-end built directly into a clocked comparator, achieving high sensitivity and energy-efficiency. A simple model of the receiver provides intuition on the effects of wiring and photodiode capacitance, and leads to a photodiode-splitting technique enabling improved sensitivity at higher data rates. The receiver is characterized in situ and shown to operate with A-sensitivity at 3.5 Gb/s with a power consumption of 180 W ( 52 fJ/bit) and area of 108 m. This work demonstrates that photonics and electronics can be jointly integrated in a standard 45-nm SOI process.

• 出版日期2012-7