A SiGe BiCMOS burst-mode 155 Mb/s receiver for PON

In this paper we present an integrated 155 Mb/s burst-mode receiver (BMR) for passive optical network (PON) applications. The chip receives optical signals over a wide dynamic range (-27 dBm to 1 dBm) and temperature range (-40° C to +85° C). The chip was implemented using a sub-micron SiGe BiCMOS technology and occupies an area of 4.3 × 4.9 mm²with a power consumption of 500 mW from a supply voltage of 5 V. In the receiver analog front-end we used a low-noise wide-band transimpedance amplifier followed by a non-linear gain stage, to cover a wide signal range without changing the transimpedance gain. The circuit dynamically adjusts through a feedback loop the receiver threshold voltage, thus optimizing the pulse-width distortion and canceling the optical as well as the electrical offset voltages.