This paper presents an optical receiver for short reach applications through low-cost plastic optical fiber. The limited bandwidth caused by the fiber and the external photodiode is compensated by a new adaptive equalizer based on the spectrum balancing technique. A clock and data recovery circuit is included that minimizes jitter and metastability using a new multi-level bang-bang architecture. The prototype, implemented in a standard 0.18-μm CMOS process, achieves 1.25 Gb/s with a power under 110 mW at only 1 V.