Low-power 850 nm optoelectronic integrated circuit receiver fabricated in 65 nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor technology

The authors present a low-power 850 nm Si optoelectronic integrated circuit (OEIC) receiver fabricated in standard 65 nm complementary metal–oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. They analyse power consumption of previously reported CMOS OEIC receivers and determine the authors receiver architecture for low-power operation. Their OEIC receiver consists of a CMOS-compatible avalanche photodetector and electronic circuits that include an inverter-based transimpedance amplifier, a tunable equaliser and a post amplifier. With the fabricated OEIC receiver, they successfully demonstrate 8 Gb/s operation with a bit-error rate <10 at incident optical power of −4.5 dBm. Their OEIC receiver consumes 5 mW with 1.2 V supply voltage. To the best of their knowledge, their OEIC receiver achieves the lowest energy efficiency among 850 nm CMOS OEIC receivers.