ORINoCO: Optical Receivers IN standard CmOs

Optical communication is an interesting alternative for communication over a copper wire when speed, weight and electromagnetic immunity are considered important. If the cost of going optical instead of staying electrical were not so high, it would probably be used in a lot more applications. Therefore, in order to make this possible, the goal of this project is to investigate a novel concept of implementing a full optical receiver in a low cost technology. This will lead to cheaper, smaller and lower power optical communication systems and, as a result, will lead to optical communication becoming more in the reach of the consumer market.

The objective of this project is to investigate if and how light can be received by means of an antenne instead of with a photodiode. Since a photodiode can hardly be implemented efficiently in a low cost technology, while this is not the case for an antenna, this is a very interesting road towards low cost optical solutions. Next to the cost issue, it is expected that the research within this project will result in optical receivers that are at least an order of magnitude more power efficient than current solutions. Therefore, also the other building blocks of an optical communication system will be explored and optimised for the novel detector concepts that will be developed.