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High Speed Systems
Driven from the increasing demand for communication bandwidth, serial data links become more and more important. A few years ago, optical long haul transmission drove the speed requirements of the links. After the internet hype, the capacity requirements for long distance links were reassessed. Nowadays, chip to chips communication, e.g. PCI Express, Serial-ATA, Firewire IEEE 1194, etc. more and more pushes electronics to high speeds. In the future, the communication speed between the chips will increase and the copper line will be replaced by an optical fiber. One of our goals is the development of an optical 40 Gbit/s serial data link implemented in a standard CMOS process. Since the receiver comprises all critical circuit blocks, we first focus thereon. The role of the receiver is the transformation of the optical pulses into electrical signals and the recovery of the clock signal and of the data bits from the incoming serial data stream. Furthermore, the data rate has to be reduced (demultiplexing from 40 Gbit/s to e.g. 2.5 Gbit/s) for further processing in the chip.