A 40-Gb/s Optical Transceiver Front-End in 45 nm SOI CMOS

A low-power, 40-Gb/s optical transceiver front-end is demonstrated in a 45-nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS process. Both single-ended and differential optical modulators are demonstrated with floating-body transistors to reach output swings of more than 2V(PP) and 4V(PP), respectively. A single-ended gain of 7.6 dB is measured over 33 GHz. The optical receiver consists of a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and post-amplifier with 55 dB.Omega of transimpedance over 30 GHz. The group-delay variation is +/-3.9 ps over the 3-dB bandwidth and the average input-referred noise density is 20.5 pA/root Hz. The TIA consumes 9 mW from a 1-V supply for a transimpedance figure of merit of 1875 Omega/pJ. This represents the lowest power consumption for a transmitter and receiver operating at 40 Gb/s in a CMOS process.