Performance study of mixed signal CMOS photoreceiver circuits

Abstract

Recent advances in the integrated electronic circuit industry have spurred efforts to develop technologies that efficiently integrate optics and electronics on a single Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) chip. Such CMOS technologies can significantly increase circuit functionality and performance at low fabrication and system cost, thereby accelerating the trend of significant growth in this area. The new functionality could include optical based sensors, image processing, and intelligent optical read heads for faster and more efficient data sorting and searching. The reliability of such monolithic CMOS based functions would be drastically improved relative to their bulk optic counterparts. In the optical telecommunications industry, short haul fiber links would benefit from low cost, silicon CMOS based photoreceivers. One of the primary challenges facing the designers in implementing CMOS based optoelectronic circuits is opto-electrical conversion efficiency. The poor optical responsivity of silicon leads to a bottleneck in the optical to electrical conversion for CMOS based photodetectors. This can be compensated in part through more efficient receiver electronics. Efforts have been made to provide mixed signal circuit design to analyze CMOS based high performance, low noise, integrated receiver circuits. This paper evaluates the performance analysis of five types of photoreceiver configurations that were designed for specific applications.