A novel 10GHz CMOS inductive buffered transimpedance amplifier stage for optical transceivers

This paper presents a novel CMOS current feed-back inductive buffered transimpedance amplifier (IB-TIA) stage using the IBM 130 nm 8M2P CMOS process technology. Using the novel inductive buffer technique a 10 GHz bandwidth was achieved with a transimpedance gain of ap 47 dBOmega without large gain peaking when compared to the inductive shunt peaking technique. In addition, the inductive buffer also provides an improved signal replica at the source-output at higher frequencies compared to an ordinary output buffer. The output noise voltage spectral density was 2 nV/ radicHz , while, the input referred noise current spectral density was below 10 pA/ radicHz within the -3dB bandwidth. Eye diagram simulations using a -53 dBm input photo-diode current signal and a 2³¹-1 pseudo random bit sequence data pattern, indicates an eye opening of 100% at 2 Gbits/s, 40% at 5 Gbits/sec and 8% at 11 Gbits/sec. This IB-TIA is thus a robust building block for numerous optical transceiver applications with low bit error ratio (BER) figure.