A 57dBOmega 1GHz CMOS Front-End Preamplifier for Optical Receivers

A front-end preamplifier consisted of transimpedance amplifier (TIA) core, single-to-differential converter (STDC) and output buffer(OB) is proposed in this paper. The goal is to realize a low cost and high performance preamplifier to be used in the optical receiver modules based on the standard 0.5um complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process. The regulated cascade (RGC) input structure followed by a gain stage and a resistive feedback is employed in the TIA core. The measurement results show that the chip achieves a transimpedance gain of 57.56dBΩ, -3dB bandwidth of 1.04GHz, and 18.33pA/sqrt(Hz) input referred noise current. Under a 3.3V supply voltage, the front-end TIA consumes 73.38mW and the total chip area is 941.6 × 1042.2um
²
including an output buffer and testing pads.