A 1310/1550 nm Fully-Integrated Optical Receiver with Schottky Photodiode and Low-Noise Transimpedance Amplifier in 40 nm Bulk CMOS

Abstract

This paper presents an optical receiver in 40 nm bulk CMOS for 1310 and 1550 nm light, which is used for singlemode fiber communication. A Schottky photodiode converts the light into a current with a responsivity of 1 and 0.3 mA/ W respectively. A 3-stage voltage amplifier with negative resistive and positive capacitive feedback is used as transimpedance amplifier with a simulated integrated input-referred noise current of less than 100 and 200 nA for a bandwidth of 0.5 and 1 GHz respectively. Measurement results are presented of the chip, which consumes 48.7mW, for both 1310 and 1550nm light. For 1310 nm light, bit rates up to 1 Gb/s are received with a bit error rate of 10−10 and a sensitivity of 3.4 dBm. To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first fully-integrated optical receiver in bulk CMOS for these wavelengths.