Increasing bandwidth requirements have pushed the traditionally electrical wireline interconnects within computing systems and data centers to their limits. As data-rates
scale, the shortcomings of electrical channels are becoming more severe. Technology scaling favors I/O circuit performance, but the bandwidth of electrical channels does not scale with the same trend. Several receiver and transmitter equalization techniques have been proposed to overcome this bandwidth limitation. However, these compensation techniques consume considerable power and die area, and, as a result, current high-speed I/O link designs are increasingly becoming power and channel-limited.

Optical interconnects are essential components in data center networks. Energy proportional data centers can achieve significant power savings by reducing power consumption at lower data-rates or when idle. We use adaptive body biasing to present an energy proportional source-synchronous 4-channel WDM-based parallel optical receiver.