Reliable CMOS adaptive equalizer for short-haul optical networks

A new low-voltage CMOS continuous-time adaptive equalizer for short-haul gigabit optical communications is presented in this paper. It was designed to compensate the attenuation of a 1.25 Gb/s signal with a simple NRZ modulation, transmitted through a 50-m length 1-mm core step-index plastic optical fiber (SI-POF). A new version of the spectrum-balancing technique is used as an adaptive criterion, achieving a simple and reliable equalization. The proposed system was designed in a cost-effective 0.18-μm CMOS process. Post-layout simulations demonstrate a signal bandwidth enhancement from 100 MHz to 1.23 GHz for this optical channel, with a total power consumption of 14.3 mW.