8 Gb/s CMOS compatible monolithically integrated silicon optical receiver

A high-speed monolithically integrated optical receiver fabricated in an unmodified 130 nm CMOS process was presented. The receiver operated with bit error rate < 10-9 up to 8 Gb/s with a sensitivity of -10.9 dBm at 5 Gb/s. Single voltage supply (3 V) was possible up to 3.125 Gb/s and at 5 V up to 5 Gb/s. It was found that deeper electrodes can improve performance of the photodetector reducing the reverse bias necessary for high sensitivity high speed operation.