High-speed optoelectronics receivers in SiGe

This paper focuses on the investigation of integrated CMOS and Silicon/Germanium (SiGe) devices for highspeed optical receiver circuits. In this paper, we present several competitive designs of front-end transimpedance amplifiers (TIA) for optical receiver applications using the IBM 5HP (0.5micron) SiGe technology. This technology exhibits f(T) and f(MAX) of 47GHz and 65GHz respectively. Spectre simulations in the Cadence Affirma analog design environment are conducted for both the TIA's and a complete receiver circuit consisting of a TIA, a cascaded multi-stage differential amplifier and a multi-stage inverting amplifier at the single supply voltage of 3.3V. We also discuss the practicality of using SiGe based photodetectors for 1.3-1.5um wavelength light and the use of Neolinear's NeoCircuit/NeoCell mixed signal design tools for optimization of the analog circuits.