A 40 Gbps Low-Power Inverter-Based CNTFET Optical Receiver

A low-power 40 Gbps optical receiver based on 32 nm carbon nanotube field-effect transistor (CNTFET) technology is presented in this work. The proposed architecture incorporates a modified inverter-based transimpedance amplifier (TIA) followed by cascaded limiting amplifiers (LAs). By employing the \(\:{g}_{m}/{I}_{D}\) design methodology, the TIA achieves an optimized trade-off among gain, bandwidth, noise, and power consumption. Simulation results show that the TIA attains a transimpedance gain of 47.6 dBΩ, a − 3 dB bandwidth of 28.4 GHz, and an input-referred noise current of 15.5 pA/√Hz, consuming only 183 µW within a 3.93 µm² area. The complete receiver achieves an overall gain of 77.8 dBΩ, a − 3 dB bandwidth of 29.5 GHz, and total power consumption of 1.37 mW in a 49.19 µm² layout. Analytical predictions based on the \(\:{g}_{m}/{I}_{D}\) framework show strong agreement with simulation results, validating the design methodology. Compared to conventional CMOS-based implementations, the proposed CNTFET receiver provides significant improvements in power efficiency, noise performance, and integration density, making it a promising candidate for next-generation optical interconnects and communication systems.