A 48-mW 18-Gb/s fully integrated CMOS optical receiver with photodetector and adaptive equalizer

A 65-nm CMOS monolithic optical receiver IC with on-chip photodetector (PD) using the p-well/deep-n-well (PW/DNW) junction is presented for short-range optical communication using 850-nm wavelength. An adaptive continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE) with 33-dB tunable gain is employed to compensate for the limited PD responsivity and bandwidth. For 850-nm optical PRBS-15 inputs, the receiver achieves record data rates and efficiencies of 9 Gb/s at 5.35 pJ/bit and 18 Gb/s at 2.7 pJ/bit with the PD biased in 0.5-V standard mode and 12.3-V avalanche mode, respectively. The core chip occupies 0.23 mm² and consumes 48 mW.