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

  • Authors:
  • Xuning Chen;Gu-Yeon Wei;Li-Shiuan Peh

  • Affiliations:
  • Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA;Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA;Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th international symposium on Low power electronics and design
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

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 1.2V to 0.6V with almost linearly scalable bandwidth from 8Gb/s to 4Gb/s, and power consumption from 36mW to 5mW in a 130nm 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.