0.013 mm2 and Low-power 10 Gb/s Transimpedance Amplifier for Short-reach Optical Interconnects

A transimpedance amplifier (TIA) has been designed and implemented for short-reach optical interconnect applications. The TIA, which is based on the regulated cascode technique, is implemented with a bandwidth enhancement technique, where capacitive degeneration and resistive feedback has been exploited in a 0.13 mu m CMOS technology, while maintaining a small chip area and low power consumption. The TIA showed a measured transimpedance gain of 51dB Omega and works up to 10 Gb/s in the presence of 0.3 pF input photodiode capacitance. It occupies an active area of 0.013 mm(2) with a power dissipation of 4.3 mW. The proposed TIA achieved high gain-bandwidth product per DC power (GBP/DC) figure of merit of 589 GHzX/mW with an input referred noise of 20 pA/root Hz. (c) 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.