Study And Fabrication Of 10 GB/s Monolithic Optoelectronic Integrated Circuit (OEIC) Receiver And Limiting Amplifier

Monolithic optoelectronic integrated circuits (OEIC) are kinds of novel devices that integrate optoelectronic components, such as lasers and photodetectors, and electronic components, such as field effect transistor and heterojunction bipolar transistor, onto one chip. It can improve performance and stability of the device because of the elimination of bonding wire and parasitic. It has the advantages of small size, cost-effective and high reliability, and will be very widely used in the fields of large capacity optical fiber communication, optical access network, optical computer, miniature photoelectric sensor, photoelectric sensor array, optical storage, optical switch and optical neural networks, and so on.With the development of the technology and the market demand, monolithic OEIC is getting more and more complex and contains more and more components. Finally, it will fully integrate the optoelectronic devices, pre-amplifier, main amplifier and clock and data recovery circuits together. The purpose of this work is to develop the monolithic OEIC optical receiver and limiting amplifier, the main conclusion and contributions include:(1) Completely based on domestic technologies of material epitaxy and pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistors (PHEMT), a monolithic OEIC optical receiver has been developed, which consists of a metal-semiconductor-metal (MSM) photodetector and a current mode transimpedance amplifier (TIA). The output eye diagrams for 10 Gb/s NRZ pseudorandom binary sequence have been attained.(2) The MSM photodetector has been investigated detailedly. It can be found from the related references that, the performance of the separate photodetector or the circuit is perfect, but it is not good enough for the integrated device. One of the most important reasons is capacitance, the key parameter, which restricts the overall performance of the monolithic OEIC devices. The further analysis of the capacitance is discussed. At the same time, a device model of MSM photodetector has been established and optimized by simulation software ATLAS and has been applied to the fabrication of device.(3) The key technologies of monolithic OEIC device's fabrication, such as mesa etch-stop, electron beam lithography and MSM photodetector fabrication and so on, have been studied and related technical rules have been established. To our knowledges, this is the first report about the mesa process. The compatibility problem between GaAs PHEMT monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC) process and MSM photodetector process has been solved, and a foundation has been laid for technologic standardization of opto-electronic integrated devices.(4) The pre-amplifier used in OEIC optical receiver has been fabricated. First of all, the performances of PHEMT are investigated detailedly, which include I-V, small signal S-parameter and noise performance and so on. Then, an EEHEMT model is given. Finally, a wide band and low noise pre-amplifier has been designed and fabricated. The influence of photodetector is considered specially, because the frequency characteristics of pre-amplifier and integrated chip are restricted by the capacitance of photodetector. The problem can be solved properly by using current mode TIA.(5) A limiting amplifier has been designed and fabricated by using depletion mode PHEMT for the first time. It is not suitable for depletion mode (D mode) HEMT to design limiting amplifier because of its inherent limitation, therefore, the mixed process of enhancement mode (E mode) and D mode HEMT is used widely. The differential structure is used in limiting amplifier and the higher standard of process is demanded, which should also be considered in circuits design. It is basic technology for fully integration of monolithic OEIC optical receiver.(6) The passive devices have been designed and validated. The passive devices determined the bias and input/output matching and influence the device performance of bandwidth and center frequency. The most important and difficult problem is inductance, which has been designed and simulated by software HFSS, and a good match has been demonstrated. It is one of the important works for this dissertation.