Tutorial: Front-End Circuit Design for High-Speed Optical Transceivers

Optical transceivers form the backbone of our ICT infrastructure and are required to transport ever-growing capacities in ever-shrinking energy and density footprints. In this tutorial, CMOS and SiGe BiCMOS front-end circuits such as low-noise broadband transimpedance amplifiers, broadband drivers for modulators and lasers will be addressed, covering low-power lumped and traveling-wave implementations. Next, it will be shown how co-design of electronics and photonics can be used to optimize performance such as bandwidth, power consumption or area. Such codesign can extend beyond quantitative optimization to include shifting functionality between the optical and electronic domain.