A High-Speed Fully-Integrated POF Receiver With Large-Area Photo Detectors in 65 nm CMOS

This paper describes the design of a multi-gigabit fiber-optic receiver with integrated large-area photo detectors for plastic optical fiber applications. An integrated 250 μm diameter non-SML NW/P-sub photo detector is adopted to allow efficient light coupling. The theory of applying a fully-differential pre-amplifier with a single-ended photo current is also examined and a super-Gm transimpedance amplifier has been proposed to drive a C
_PD
of 14 pF to multi-gigahertz frequency. Both differential and common-mode operations of the proposed super-Gm transimpedance amplifier have been analyzed and a differential noise analysis is performed. A digitally-controlled linear equalizer is proposed to produce a slow-rising-slope frequency response to compensate for the photo detector up to 3 GHz. The proposed POF receiver consists of an illuminated signal photo detector, a shielded dummy photo detector, a super-Gm transimpedance amplifier, a variable-gain amplifier, a linear equalizer, a post amplifier, and an output driver. A test chip is fabricated in TSMC's 65 nm low-power CMOS process, and it consumes 50 mW of DC power (excluding the output driver) from a single 1.2 V supply. A bit-error rate of less than 10
^-12
has been measured at a data rate of 3.125 Gbps with a 670 nm VCSEL-based electro-optical transmitter.