Multi-Rate Adaptive Equalizer for Transmission Over Up to 50-m SI-POF

This letter presents a novel adaptive continuous-time equalizer integrated in a receiver front-end for short-reach high-speed optical communications through low-cost step-index plastic optical fibers (SI-POF). The proposed equalizer is able to compensate the variations in the frequency response and attenuation of a 1-mm diameter SI-POF but it is also able to work at different data rates ranging from 400 Mb/s to 2.5 Gb/s. The prototype has been integrated in a cost-effective standard 0.18-μm CMOS technology, and requires 60 mW of power consumption under just 1-V supply voltage.