Highly sensitive wide-dynamic range optical burst-mode receivers for ultra fast gain switching

Abstract

Highly sensitive optical receivers in BiCMOS, sub-micron and deep-sub-micron CMOS technology are compared. Special attention is paid to burst-mode receivers with a wide-dynamic input range and with fast gain switching. A new burst-mode receiver design in 0.12 µm CMOS technology for a data rate of 2.5 Gb/s and very fast gain switching is presented. Handling a wide dynamic range leads to stability problems when the transimpedance gain of the preamplifier is decreased. These stability problems could be solved by decreasing the open-loop gain of the transimpedance amplifier. Stability analysis of this solution is presented here.