Programmable Active Clock Spine for 100Gb/200Gb Coherent Optical Receiver Chip in 32nm CMOS

This paper describes an active clock distribution network for a 100G/200G coherent optical receiver. The chip has more than 1 billion transistors implemented in 32nm CMOS bulk technology with 11 metal layers. The active clock spines enabled a low-skew, low jitter, and low power clock distribution solution. In addition, a debug-friendly clocking environment provides easy observability, testing, and reconfiguration features; hence, enabling rapid time to market.