A monolithically integrated optical receiver with a silicon avalanche photodetector for fiber-wireless IEEE 802.11 WLAN applications

We present a monolithically integrated optical receiver fabricated with standard silicon processing technology for fiber-wireless IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) applications. The receiver contains a silicon avalanche photodetector and a transimpedance amplifier and has up to 5.6-GHz photodetection bandwidth. Using this integrated optical receiver, transmission of 54-Mb/s WLAN signals at 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz bands is successfully achieved with 2.6-% and 3.0-% error vector magnitude, respectively.