BiCMOS amplifier for 10 Gb/s optical receiver

A 10 Gb/s BiCMOS amplifier for SDH STM-64 optical receiver was designed, which included a NMOS limiting amplifier and a differential BiCMOS main amplifier. In order to keep the designed amplifier operation on 10 Gb/s or higher rate with lower power, negative feedback was introduced in both of the two amplifiers, and some measures such as components parameters optimization and speed-up were taken. The experimental results show that when the designed amplifier working over 10 Gb/s, input dynamic range of the main amplifier is about 42 dB(3.2~500 mV), output swing is 250 mV with 50 ω load. The highest bit rate could be up to 12 Gb/s with a small-signal input, the average power dissipation is 230 mW with the supply voltage of 1.8~5.6 V. So the BiCMOS amplifier can meet the high-performance requirements of fiber communication systems.