Monolithically integrated optical receiver with large-area avalanche photodiode in high-voltage CMOS technology

A novel monolithically integrated optoelectronic receiver with a 200 μm diameter, high responsivity avalanche photodiode (PD) is presented. The whole receiver was developed in a high-voltage 0.35 μm CMOS technology. This permits high PD bias voltages and the implementation of the receiver circuitry in a single chip. With a PD bias voltage of 65 V, a high responsivity of 30 A/W has been reached at a wavelength of 675 nm. Together with a folded-cascode transimpedance amplifier, the complete receiver achieves a sensitivity of -31.8 dBm at a data rate of 1 Gbit/s with a bit error rate of 10^-9 and a pseudorandom binary sequence of 2³¹-1.