A gigabit fully integrated plastic optical fiber receiver for a RC-LED source

The presented work describes a plastic optical fiber receiver for gigabit transmission using a resonant cavity light emitting diode (RC-LED). The integrated optical receiver is realized in 0.6μm BiCMOS technology. The main novelty of the presented design is the integration of the equalizer with the optical receiver. A large area Si photodiode is integrated with the optical receiver. The design combines a TIA, equalizer and post amplifier stage followed by a 50 Ω output driver. To minimize power supply noise and substrate noise, a fully differential design is used. A dummy TIA provides a symmetrical input signal reference and a control loop is used to compensate the offset levels. The total transimpedance of the complete receiver chain is in the range of 85dBΩ. The value of the DC gain and the corner frequency of the equalizer can be adapted via an external control voltage to adapt the design to different SI-POF lengths and RC-LED limited bandwidths. The optical receiver operates at a 3.3 V single power supply and the total current consumption is 31mA. The presented optical receiver succeeded to equalize the low-bandwidth transmission system (RC-LED and 50m POF). A data rate of 1Gbit/s can be transmitted over 50m SI-POF with a sensitivity of -13dBm at BER of 10^-9.