Co-design of a differential transimpedance amplifier and balanced photodetector for a sub-pJ/bit silicon photonics receiver
Ke Li, Shenghao Liu, Xiaoke Ruan, Dave J. Thomson, Yang Hong, Fan Yang, Lei Zhang, Cosimo Lacava, Fanfan Meng, Weiwei Zhang, Periklis Petropoulos, Fan Zhang, Graham T. Reed
Abstract
This paper presents the design and implementation of a fully differential optical receiver, which is aimed for short reach intensity modulation and direct detection (IMDD) transceiver links. A Si-Ge balanced photodetector (PD) has been co-designed and packaged with a novel differential transimpedance amplifier (TIA). The TIA design is realized with a standard 28 nm CMOS process and operates with a standard digital supply (1V). Without using any equalization or DSP techniques, the proposed receiver can operate up to 54 Gb/s with a BER less than the KP4 limit (2.2×10 −4 ) under an optical modulation amplitude (OMA) of -8.6 dBm, while the power efficiency has been optimized to 0.55 pJ/bit (0.98 pJ/bit if output buffer is included).