A novel 10GHz CMOS inductive buffered transimpedance amplifier stage for optical transceivers

This paper presents a novel CMOS current feed-back inductive buffered transimpedance amplifier (IB-TIA) stage using the IBM 130nm 8M2P CMOS process technology. Using the novel inductive buffer technique a 10GHz bandwidth was achieved with a transimpedance gain of ≈ 47dBΩ without large gain peaking when compared to the inductive shunt peaking technique. In addition, the inductive buffer also provides an improved signal replica at the source-output at higher frequencies compared to an ordinary output buffer. The output noise voltage spectral density was 2 nV/ √Hz , while, the input referred noise current spectral density was below 10 pA/ √Hz within the −3dB bandwidth. Eye diagram simulations using a −53dBm input photo-diode current signal and a 2³¹-1 pseudo random bit sequence data pattern, indicates an eye opening of 100% at 2Gbits/s, 40% at 5Gbits/sec and 8% at 11Gbits/sec. This IB-TIA is thus a robust building block for numerous optical transceiver applications with low bit error ratio (BER) figure.