Design of Integrated Circuits for Optical Communications

Very nice explanations of SerDes for beginners!

I found the book to make topics relatively easy to understand/get reintroduced to if you’re a bit rusty. Sufficient depth as well to get you started with references for deeper dives.

Great book for integrated photonics. If you don't know about noise, feedback and basic amplifier CMOS theory then you should pair it with Razavi's other book: Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits.

i own both editions of this book. Excellent preparation, analysis-attention to details-i strongly recommend it-same in class as Dr.Sackinger's book-

Behzad Razavi is a great writer and teacher. His text takes on a very intuitive look at circuits before going on to some (generally lightweight) analysis—and intuition is the first recourse of every good analog designer. However, I found this particular book a bit light on content. However, it does not get very far into detailed design considerations like sizing tradeoffs (although it does talk about general considerations), and the comparisons between different types of circuits are very much only first-order—as I recall, primarily gain-bandwidth-noise tradeoffs. In some cases, I feel like Razavi has skimmed far too lightly on certain circuit topologies that are nonetheless important to a complete system, not really discussing theory of operation or design. On the other hand, the book is very well-cited and seems like it was reasonably cutting-edge at the time of publication—it's easy to follow references for many circuits back to journal publications. That said, it's still a good general introduction into these types of circuits found in optical communication, for someone with a basic electronics background. This is a good book for senior undergraduate or early graduate studies, although significantly more information is needed than what is provided in the book to make topology and sizing design decisions even for a fairly simple, non-cutting-edge receiver. The book lacks any kind of discussion of linearity, which is one of my current research interests; this is not a significant criticism, though, as I understand that conventional optical communication is primarily fairly simple modulation of data (on-off keying), where linearity is not important, so this is more of a frontier topic in the realm of optical/photonic electronic circuits. My interest at the moment is primarily transmitter and receiver circuits, so I have not looked at the oscillator, PLL, etc. content very much.