The advance of modern IC processes has supported increasing bit-rates in many consumer and professional applications, such as hard disk drives and optical networking. Achieving a higher bit-rate by applying a new generation of an IC process for analog circuits and systems is not a simple matter of scaling existing solutions. The reduced feature size of new generations of IC technology drives the improvement of high-frequency performance of transistors and passive elements, but at the same time requires a reduction of supply voltages. This poses significant challenges to the design of high-frequency building blocks. Example applications that highlight these challenges are transceivers and cross-connect switch ICs for optical networking.
In optical networks, bit-rates in the physical layer have increased over the past two decades from 155 Mb/s to approximately 40 Gb/s (see Fig. 1.1).
Network capacity is being increased by two technologies simultaneously. One is higher data processing speeds and electronic time division multiplexing (ETDM), which drives the increase of bit-rates. The second is wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), which allows the use of multiple independent data streams per fibre, each assigned a different colour and thereby multiplying the data transmission capacity per fibre by the number of colours used. The WDM technique will not be further discussed.
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(2008). The Challenge. In: Circuit and Interconnect Design for RF and High Bit-Rate Applications. Analog Circuits And Signal Processing Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6884-3_1
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