High-performance receiver front-ends in gallium arsenide-on-silicon technology for local optical interconnect systems

As the demand for communication bandwidth in high performance systems grows, optical interconnections between electronic systems and subsystems become increasingly attractive. In addition to long-haul telecommunications, local area networks and optical interconnects at the board and chip level present applications where optical communication channels have the potential to significantly improve system performance. These applications impose special requirements on the optoelectronic components that make their monolithic integration especially attractive. The main obstacle to achieving the monolithic integration of an optical receiver is the transition between different semiconductor technologies at the electro-optic interface. The optical properties of compound semiconductor materials make them the most appropriate choice for optical sources and detectors, while silicon is the preferred material in which to implement the circuitry for processing information (data). The epitaxial growth of GaAs films on silicon substrates has made it possible to merge GaAs and silicon devices on a common substrate.;In this work, the relevant area, bandwidth, and sensitivity issues involved in the design of an optical receiver are examined and the advantages of monolithic GaAs-on-silicon integration for local optical interconnect applications are presented. This thesis describes a monolithic technology for integrating GaAs and silicon devices and demonstrates that such integration can be used to achieve significant improvements in circuit and system performance.;The monolithic GaAs-on-silicon technology presented herein has been used to implement a 1-GHz GaAs/Si optical receiver front-end with an equivalent input noise current density of less than 3 pA/;In transimpedance receivers, a trade-off usually exists between the noise and bandwidth of the receiver. In this thesis, a new feedback amplifier configuration is presented that overcomes this trade-off. An optical receiver front-end employing this configuration has been designed and integrated in a 2-...