Design of low-power short-distance opto-electronic transceiver front-ends with scalable supply voltages and frequencies

The need for low-power I/Os is widely recognized, as I/Os take up a significant portion of total chip power. In recent years, researchers have pointed to the potential system-level power savings that can be realized if dynamic voltage scalable I/Os are available. However, substantial challenges remain in building such links. This paper presents the design and implementation details of opto-electronic transceiver front-end blocks where supply voltage can scale from 1.2 V to 0.6 V with almost linearly scalable bandwidth from 8 Gb/s to 4 Gb/s, and power consumption from 36 mW to 5 mW in a 130 nm CMOS process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first circuit demonstration of voltage-scalable optical links. It demonstrates the feasibility of dynamic voltage scalable optical I/Os.