Common-emitter feedback transimpedance amplifier for analog optical receivers

In this paper, we present a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) for analog optical communication based on common-emitter feedback (CEFB). CEFB is compared to traditional resistive feedback (RFB) in four metrics: gain, bandwidth, noise and linearity. In simulation, CEFB shows a 15% improvement in gain-bandwidth product and a 2dB reduction in noise over RFB. When followed by a common-emitter gain stage, CEFB shows vast improvement in linearity over RFB, 24dB higher IP3 and 57dB higher IP2. This large advantage in linearity makes CEFB especially well suited to analog applications, such as analog optical receivers