We report on a novel structure for differential pairs of III-V optical thyristors, which functions as an optical-to- electrical converter for incoming digital optical pulses (rather than as an opto-optical converter). This novel detector has unique properties which makes it most suitable for short-distance optical interconnects. First, it is very sensitive: we show that it is sensitive to optical pulses of only 3 femtojoule at 830 nm. This allows for the use of less efficient cheap LEDs as light-emitters. Second, we demonstrate a bitrate of 155 Mbit/s, which is appealing for inter-MCM and inter-chip interconnects. Third, the transceiver is switched with a CMOS-compatible voltage (5 V) and the electrical output signals are of the order of 0.3 V, easy to detect with a small CMOS circuitry. Fourth, the detector is compact: presently, its area is 200 micron $MUL 160 micron, and it can be scaled down to 50 micron $MUL 50 micron. This allows for large parallelism, e.g. thousands of interconnections per chip.
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