Inductorless, powerl-proportional, optical receiver front-end in TSMC 90 nm

Abstract

This work presents the design and performance of an inductorless, power proportional tunable optical receiver front-end in TSMC 90nm CMOS technology. The proposed optical receiver front-end includes a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and a post amplifier. The TIA uses the shunt feedback topology with a current controlling a MOSFET array, and the post amplifier uses a common source topology loaded with active inductors. The receiver front-end has the ability to tune from 1.25 Gb/s data rate to 15 Gb/s with proportional power dissipation and a constant gain of 84 dBΩ. The overall power dissipation varies from 0.94 mW to 7.46 mW as the data rate scales maintaining power dissipation below 800 fJ/bit at all data rates. The variable 3 dB bandwidth is from 886.1 MHz to 10.83 GHz with an input referred noise density from 4.307 pA/sqrt(Hz) to 14.27 pA/sqrt(Hz).