A 60dBO 2.9 GHz 0.18 µm CMOS transimpedance amplifier for a fiber optic receiver application

This paper presents the design and characterization of a high gain, high-speed differential transimpedance amplifier (TIA) to be used as the front-end interface for optical receiver applications. The TIA is realized in a standard 0.18-μm digital CMOS technology and it dissipates 25.4mW from a single 1.8 V supply. The objective of the design is to maximize the bandwidth. The main contribution of this work is the optimization procedure. The topology consists of a common gate input stage followed by a cascoded common source and a common drain stage surrounded by a global shunt-shunt feedback with phantom zero compensation to boost bandwidth and enhance stability. Using this approach the amplifier achieves transimpedance gain of 59.75 dbΩ, -3dB bandwidth of 2.9 GHz when connected to a 2-pF photodiode at the input and a 250 Ω load at the output, and 13.14 pA/vHz input referred noise.