Multi-Rate Low-Noise Optical Receiver Front-End

Conventional optical receivers are mostly optimized for single data rate. In this work, after examining conventional optical front-ends, we present the low-noise tunable front-end (LNTF) topology, which is able to achieve optimized noise performance at multiple data rates. In addition, colored noise optimization techniques including capacitive noise scaling and CMOS inverter based transimpedance amplifier (TIA) are also studied, which together with the LNTF form a low-noise design methodology for silicon photonics based CMOS optical receiver. Employing these techniques, the implemented 3D hybrid-integrated silicon photonics receiver achieves excellent noise performance of 0.91 μArms and 0.5 μArms input-referred noise current at 25 and 10 Gb/s, respectively, which enables high sensitivity of -14.6 dBm and -16.5 dBm OMA at BER = 10-12, correspondingly.