3 GHz, 1 mW inverter‐based TIA with capacitive feedback for enhanced gain and sensitivity in VLC applications

Abstract

In this Letter, a novel inverter-based trans-impedance amplifier (TIA) with enhanced gain and sensitivity is presented for Gb/s visible light communication (VLC). By employing capacitive feedback with a large negative equivalent capacitance to reduce the TIA input capacitance, the proposed TIA achieves a trans-impedance gain of 89.4 dBΩ with 5.7 dB improvement and an input referred noise current of 0.43 µA rms with 1.8 dB improvement when compared to a reference TIA without capacitive feedback. Both the proposed TIA and the reference TIA have the same −3 dB bandwidth (BW) of 3 GHz and the same power consumption of 1 mW, and they are designed with a 40 nm CMOS process.