A 4Gb/s current-mode optical transceiver in 0.18µm CMOS

Abstract

Digital multimedia systems are becoming more and morepopular, and therefore, a number of high-speed digital interface standards have been introduced: LVDS, HDMI, DVI, etc [1]. DisplayPort is a digital display interface standard that is recently introduced in an attempt to meet future demands on the interface and to reduce the cost and complexity of the interface. These digital interface standards demand wider bandwidth with the exponential increase of data traffic. Hence, optical fibers can be a very suitable medium for the high-speed digital interface, since they provide wider bandwidth, lower loss, lower EMI, lower crosstalk, and lower distortion characteristics than copper-based cables. Also, the optical fibers can be exploited for the applications of Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet having high-performance storage on many corporate networks. This paper describes a low-power low-voltage current-mode 4Gb/s optical transceiver that is realized in 0.18µm CMOS. This transceiver targets the emerging gigabit interface and storage networks applications.