A 40-Gb/s optical transceiver front-end in 45nm SOI CMOS technology

A low-power, 40-Gb/s optical transceiver front-end is demonstrated in a 45 nm silicon on insulator (SOI) CMOS technology. A modulator driver uses floating body devices to realize voltage swing of 2 V_PP with a small-signal gain of 7.6 dB over 33 GHz. The optical receiver consists of a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and post-amplifier with 55-dB·Ω 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 20.47 pA/√Hz. The TIA consumes 9 mW from a 1 V supply for a transimpedance figure of merit of 1874.5 Ω/pJ. To the author´s knowledge, this represents the lowest power consumption for a transmitter and receiver operating at 40-Gb/s in a CMOS process.