Power efficient 4.5Gbit/s optical receiver in 130nm CMOS with integrated photodiode

An optical receiver with integrated photodiode in 130 nm CMOS is presented. The extremely unfavourable optical and electrical performance of a differential photodiode in this technology, namely a very low responsivity of only 5 mA/W, an optical bandwidth of 500 MHz and a large photodiode capacitance of 1pF, have been solved so that bitrates of 4.5Gbit/s and higher can be received for BER values as low as 10^-12. The power consumption for this is only 74.16 mW due to a biasing in weak inversion.