A 160 Gb/S PAM-4 Optical Receiver Using Optoelectronic Co-Design Method with Peaking PD

In this paper, we propose a low noise gain-adjustable optical receiver for a 160 Gb/s PAM-4 optical link. We use a peaking photodiode and a linear transimpedance amplifier (TIA) joint design to efficiently optimize the receiver The TIA is designed for best noise performance at the cost of TIA's bandwidth. While the peaking PD is achieved with a on-chip spiral inductor to properly compensate TIA's bandwidth. By such a optoelctronic co-design, we achieved a receiver with 61 GHz 3-dB bandwidth and an input current referred noise of 4.9 uArms. The Total Harmonic Distortion(THD) is smaller than 0.7% with 450mVpp output voltage amplitude. A clear 160 Gb/s PAM4 eye diagram is achieved in co-simulation.