Monolithic high-speed optoelectronic integrated receivers for greater than 10 gigabits per second optical communications

Recently fiber-optic communications-system speeds have increased from asynchronous-transfer-mode (ATM) rates of 155 Mb/s and Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) rates of 622 Mb/s to the optical carrier (OC) standard of OC-48 at 2.5 Gb/s. With increasing demands for wireless data transfer, networking, graphics, and high-speed communications using the Internet, OC-192 at 10Gb/s and OC-768 at 40 Gb/s are expected to become the standard fiber-optic operating speeds for the future data communication and telecommunication systems.;Using the advanced device model, circuit design, and high speed characterization, a 15 GHz -3 dB bandwidth transimpedance amplifier has been successfully demonstrated in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) 60 GHz InGaP/GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) technology. This demonstration has proved that 60 GHz GaAs PIN/HBT technology is able to provide a high level of integration and more than 20 Gb/s of operation. Using the mature 60 GHz InGaP/GaAs HBT technology, high-performance transimpedance amplifiers and photoreceivers have been designed for 10 Gb/s, 20 Gb/s, and 40 Gb/s optical communications.;A novel transimpedance amplifier structure is used in the 10 Gb/s high gain photoreceivers. With a realistic amount of parasitic (5--10 fF) attached to each node and using 60 GHz InGaP/GaAs PIN/HBT process in the circuit simulation, the transimpedance amplifier has a 33 dB forward transmission gain (S21), -14.3 dB input return loss ( S11), and -17.3 dB output return loss ( S22) in the frequency range from 30 KHz to 10 GHz. A monolithically integrated photoreceiver is designed by directly integrating a 25-um diameter PIN photodetector and the differential transimpedance amplifier. The gain bandwidth product of this receiver is 51 THz*O. Another photoreceiver with gain bandwidth product of 450 THz*O is designed with a transimpedance amplifier with -3 dB frequency of 9.4 GHz and 93.6 dB O gain into 50 O loads.;Photoreceivers at higher data rate has also been designed in this work. A two-dimensional array (2x2) receiver array at 20 Gb/s per channel is designed using the 60 GHz fT PIN/HBT technology for high-speed parallel interconnect. Each channel is designed with 43.3 dB O transimpedance gain into 50 O load and 17.4 GHz bandwidth. Peaking is not used in this wide bandwidth photoreceiver to avoid undesired overshoot and undershoot. In addition, a novel 40 Gb/s receiver which employs inductor peaking technique is designed using the 60 GHz fT PIN/HBT technology. The simulation result shows 49.3 dB O transimpedance gain and 33.5 GHz -3 dB bandwidth into 50 O load.;The concepts and the design methodologies generated in the development of these circuits are expected to have an impact on the future generations of optoelectronic integrated receivers.