High-speed, burst-mode, packet-capable optical receiver and instantaneous clock recovery for optical bus operation

This paper describes an enhanced performance version of a high-speed burst-mode compatible optical receiver and its application to 622-Mb/s optical bus operation in conjunction with an instantaneous clock recovery scheme. The receiver is fabricated in a 12 GHz f_t silicon bipolar technology and consists of a differential transimpedance amplifier with an auto-threshold level controller and a high-speed quantizer. Using an InGaAs avalanche photodiode, the typical burst mode sensitivity is around -34 dBm (10^-9 BER) at bit rates up to 1.5 Gb/s with a dynamic range of 26 db for both pseudorandom and burst signals. The results using a laser beam modulated by a high-speed external modulator indicate that the receiver can be operated at bit rates higher than 2 Gb/s. With a worst-case self-resetting time <50 ns for the threshold control circuit, the receiver is usable for optical packet communication where data signals with varying optical power are employed. This receiver was demonstrated in a 622-Mb/s optical bus application where the clock signal was recovered from the packet data signal using a novel high-speed CMOS instantaneous clock recovery IC