4×25 Gb/s Transceiver With Optical Front-end for 100 GbE System in 65 nm CMOS Technology

This paper presents a fully-integrated chipset for 4×25 Gb/s transceiver gearbox along with laser driver and photo detector front-ends. The transceiver provides 10:4 multiplexing and 4:10 demultiplexing conversion, with built-in clock generation, equalization, and amplification. The optical front-ends are realized as 4-element arrays, presenting remarkable performance with commercial vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers and photodiodes. Feedforward equalizers and continuous-time linear equalizers are employed to compensate for loss and distortion in both electrical and optical domains. Fabricated in 65 nm CMOS technology, these chips can be lumped together as a compact module with performance exceeding typical 100 GbE standards.