Publication
Conventional input/output (IO) links consume power, independent of changes in the bandwidth demand by the system they are deployed in. As the system is designed to satisfy the peak bandwidth demand, most of the time the IO links are idle but still consuming power. In big data centers, the overall utilization ratio of IO links is less than 10%, corresponding to a large amount of energy wasted for idle operation. This work demonstrates a 60 Gb/s high sensitivity non-return-to-zero (NRZ) optical receiver in 14 nm FinFET technology with less than 7 ns power-on time. The power on time includes the data detection, analog bias settling, photo-diode DC current cancellation, and phase locking by the clock and data recovery circuit (CDR). The receiver autonomously detects the data demand on the link via a proposed link protocol and does not require any external enable or disable signals. The proposed link protocol is designed to minimize the off-state power consumption and power-on time of the link. In order to achieve high data-rate and high-sensitivity while maintaining the power budget, a 1-tap decision feedback equalization method is applied in digital domain. The sensitivity is measured to be -8 dBm, -11 dBm, and -13 dBm OMA (optical modulation amplitude) at 60 Gb/s, 48 Gb/s, and 32 Gb/s data rates, respectively. The energy efficiency in always-on mode is around 2.2 pJ/bit for all data-rates with the help of supply and bias scaling. The receiver incorporates a phase interpolator based clock-and-data recovery circuit with approximately 80 MHz jitter-tolerance corner frequency, thanks to the low-latency full custom CDR logic design. This work demonstrates the fastest ever reported CMOS optical receiver and runs almost at twice the data-rate of the state-of-the-art CMOS optical receiver by the time of the publication. The data-rate is comparable to BiCMOS optical receivers but at a fraction of the power consumption.