A Low-Noise Inverter-Based Receiver for Gigabit-Per-Second Optical Wireless Communication

In this paper, an inverter-based optical receiver is proposed to support gigabit-per-second optical wireless communication (OWC). The proposed optical receiver mainly consists of inverter-based amplifiers. In particular, a low-noise shunt-feedback transimpedance amplifier (TIA) is employed based on the three-stage inverter structure with pseudo-differential output. By decreasing the power supply, the noise performance is improved significantly, while the power consumption of the receiver is reduced. In addition, a two-stage limiting amplifier (LA) is adopted to further amplify signal swing. To prevent the saturation of the receiver under strong incident ambient light, a DC photocurrent cancellation (DPC) block is employed. The proposed receiver is designed with a 180 nm standard CMOS process. Simulation results indicated that the receiver achieves a data rate of up to 2 Gb/s with a bandwidth of 1.36 GHz, a gain of 110 dB $\Omega$, and an input-referred noise (IRN) of $0.16 \mu$ Arms. Due to its simple inverter-based structure, the proposed receiver is promising to be implemented through digital synthesis in the future.