High-speed photonic/electronic conversion

We have successfully demonstrated the integration of an ultrasensitive III-V detector, based on a differential pair of optical thyristors, with a dedicated novel 1 GHz CMOS comparator amplifier followed by an R-S flip flop. The maximum frequency achieved so far for the receiver is 50 MHz. Further work is underway to improve this limit to at least the frequency achievable with the thyristor pair, i.e., several hundreds of MHz. Because of its small area and its high sensitivity to optical input signals, our receiver is a promising building block for CMOS based optoelectronic circuits.