Fabrication of a monolithic optical receiver for 850nm fiber transmission

Abstract

A new design of monolithic optical receiver at 850nm for fiber transmission is discussed in this paper. A Spatially Modulated (SM) photodetector and a pre-amplifier are integrated in the optical receiver chip. Some critical parameters of SM photodetector, such as responsivity in different regions, are calculated, and its structure is optimized to get the typical size. And then a novel Spice model of SM photodetector is accomplished in SPECTRE environment based on the numerical calculations above. The simulation results show that the bandwidth and responsivity can reach to 400MHz and 62mA/W at 850nm wavelength. The monolithic optical receiver, including SM photodetector and pre-amplifier with cutoff frequency 780MHz, was successfully fabricated in 0.5μm standard CMOS technology. The transmission rate is 100Mbps by replacing the commercial 100Mbps optical transceiver product. It is expected to be more than 100Mbps if 1000Mbps transceivers are used in test. The experiment and simulation results indicate that the monolithic optical receiver can be applied to 10M/100Mbps fiber transmission.