A 5Gbps, Inductor-less Transimpedance Amplifier for Optical Communications using 0.18μm CMOS Technology

In this paper, a two-stage 5Gbps transimpedance amplifier (TIA) for an optical communication receiver system is presented. The presented TIA uses a regulated cascode configuration (RGC) as the input stage, which benefits from low input resistance, and is followed by a gain stage with negative feed-back network and a buffer stage in order to provide extra gain to operate properly at 5Gbps. DC operating point stabilizing is also considered in this paper. The proposed TIA is discussed mathematically and related simulations are performed in HSPICE using 0.18μm CMOS technology parameters. Results for the proposed TIA show the transimpedance gain of 42.1dBΩ, bandwidth of 3.6GHz, and power consumption of 12mW at 1.5V supply voltage. Also, Monte-Carlo analysis, noise analysis and effect of temperature variation on frequency response of the TIA are analyzed, which indicate that the proposed TIA is suitable to work as a 5Gbps TIA building block in an optical communication receiver system.