Design of High-Speed CMOS Interface Circuits for Optical Communications

Abstract

The bandwidth requirement of wireline communications has increased ex-ponentially because of the ever-increasing demand for data centers and high-performance computing systems. However, it becomes difficult to satisfy the requirement with legacy electrical links which suffer from frequency-dependent losses due to skin effect, dielectric loss, channel reflections, and crosstalk, resulting in a severe bandwidth limitation. In order to overcome this challenge, it is necessary to introduce optical communication technology, which has been mainly used for long-reach communications, such as long-haul net-works and metropolitan area networks, to the medium- and short-reach com-munication systems. However, there still remain important issues to be resolved to facilitate the adoption of the optical technologies. The most critical challeng-es are the energy efficiency and the cost competitiveness as compared to the legacy copper-based electrical communications. One possible solution is silicon photonics that has long been investigated by a number of research groups. De-spite inherent incompatibility of silicon with the photonic world, silicon pho-tonics is promising and is the only solution that can leverage the mature CMOS technologies. In this thesis, we summarize the current status of silicon photonics and pro-vide the prospect of the optical interconnection. We also present key circuit techniques essential to the implementation of high-speed and low-power optical receivers. And then, we propose optical receiver architectures satisfying the aforementioned requirements with novel circuit techniques.