Design and simulation of a novel CMOS superimposed photodetector

A novel superimposed photodetector(PD)is put forward.The photodetector can obtain a couple of differential photocur-rent signals from one input optical signal.The light injection efficiency and the vertical work distance of this new photode-tector are much higher than those of the others.The superimposed photodetctor is designed based on the standard 0.18μm CMOS process.The responsivity,bandwidth and transient response of the photodetector are simulated by a commercial simulation software of ATLAS.The responsivities of two obtained photocurrent signals are 0.035 A/W and 0.034 A/W,while the bandwidths are 3.8 GHz and 5.2 GHz,respectively.A full differential optical receiver which uses the superim-posed photodetector as input is simulated.The frequency response and 4 Gbit/s eye diagram of the optical receiver are also obtained.The results show that the two output signals can be used as the differential signal.