A 56Gb/s burst-mode NRZ optical receiver with 6.8ns power-on and CDR-Lock time for adaptive optical links in 14nm FinFET CMOS

The increasing bandwidth demand in data-centers requires wireline transceivers supporting >50Gb/s/lane data-rates with low power consumption. Because link utilization in data-centers is <10% for 99% of the links [1] a promising way to reduce power consumption is fine-grained power gating, where the link is powered off during idle time. For rapid on/off functionality to be efficient with short data bursts, the link needs to wake up within a few ns, which is challenging at high speeds. Burst mode operation was previously demonstrated at 25Gb/s with 18.5ns lock-time [2] without power cycling.