Design of a high gain and power efficient optical receiver front‐end in 0.13 μM RF CMOS technology for 10 Gbps applications

In this paper, two versions of a complete RF front‐end for a 10 Gbps optical receiver are presented. The RF front‐end consists of a transimpedance amplifier and a limiter amplifier. Two versions of the TIA amplifiers are proposed. The first topology has 54 dB transimpedance gain, 11.5 GHz bandwidth and has a input current noise density of only 6.8 p A / H z. The second topology is composed by a cascade os two inverters. This topology has 48 dB transimpedance gain, 11.2 GHz bandwidth, a input current noise density of 8.9 p A / H zand occupies an area of only 0.048 mm 2 . The limiter amplifier for both optical receivers is a five stage cherry‐hooper amplifier with active inductors optimized for low power. The main amplifier has 38 dB gain, 9.8 GHz Bandwidth, 69 mW of power consumption and only 0.171 mm 2 of die area. The complete RF front‐end is fully integrated and has 10 GHz bandwidth. The circuits were designed in 0.13 μm RF CMOS technology. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:1499–1504, 2016