60 GHz Resonant Photoreceiver With an Integrated SiGe HBT Amplifier for Low Cost Analog Radio-Over-Fiber Links

Abstract

An analog radio-over-fiber photoreceiver based on a resonant narrowband transimpedance low noise amplifier (TILNA) is proposed and demonstrated for use in low-cost and low-power remote radio heads for distributed antenna systems in the unlicensed 60 GHz band. The amplifier is designed to present a conjugate matched impedance to a wirebonded photodiode where the input impedance has a real part of 10Ω while the output impedance is matched towards 50Ω. Fabricated in a 55nm SiGe BiCMOS technology, the TILNA features a three stage common emitter low noise amplifier with 17 dB of gain, a 3.4 dB noise figure, an output 1-dB compression point of 8 dBm and low power consumption of 33.6 mW while occupying only 0.25 mm 2 of chip space including pads. The photoreceiver, formed by the TILNA and a wirebonded InP UTC photodiode, offers 29 dB higher gain than a 50Ω terminated reference photodiode where 11 dB improvement is provided by resonant matching. Experimental results show that the proposed photoreceiver has achieved up to 20 Gbps C-band transmission of complex modulated waveforms over 5 km of standard single-mode fiber using 4 Gbaud QAM32 with an RMS EVM of 11.5%.

The Role of Opto-Electronic Co-Integration for 6G Systems and Networks

“…A similar opto-electronic co-integration trajectory is expected for the optical-to-RF conversion, especially in the case where analog optical transport combined with optical heterodyne upconversion [8], [9] and thus a (sub-)THz signal is directly created by the photodetector and requires amplification being radiated [10]. Such a scheme is shown in simplified fashion in Fig.…”