Field effect transistor-self electrooptic effect device (FET-SEED) differential transimpedance amplifiers for two-dimensional optical data links

A 4/spl times/18 two-dimensional array of GaAs FET-SEED (field effect transistor-self electrooptic effect device) differential transimpedence receivers has been fabricated for application in massively parallel optical data link board-to-board interconnections. Several FET-SEED receiver arrays were tested and displayed a mean response of /spl sim/0.7 mV//spl mu/W, and were capable of >100 Mbps per channel operation. The mean receiver sensitivity for a BER of <10/sup -9/ was calculated from the measured noise spectrum to be -26.8 dBm at the system design rate of 40 Mbps (18 k-22 MHz bandwidth), and -23.2 dBm for a 100 Mbps rate (dc-66 MHz bandwidth). A sensitivity of approximately -25 dBm for the 40 Mbps rate was confirmed using a bit-error-rate test set. The theoretical noise is compared to measured values with good agreement assuming a FET channel noise factor of 1.4. The 1/f noise corner frequency of /spl sim/13 MHz was found to cause a /spl sim/1.2 dB degradation in sensitivity for the 100 Mbps rate. The differential amplifier mean dc output offset voltage was measured to be 10 mV, and displayed a large sigma due to parameter variations in the active devices. Two receiver arrays were successfully used in a demonstration of a fully differential parallel optical small computer system interface (SCSI) data link.