A Novel CMOS Low-voltage Regulated Cascode Trans-impedance Amplifier Operating at 0.8V Supply Voltage

This paper describes a novel CMOS low-voltage trans-impedance amplifier topology which operates using a 0.8 V power supply with a DC power dissipation of 700 muW. A new low-voltage regulated cascode circuit has been developed which reduces the need for extra bias voltages compared to other recent low-voltage regulated cascode topology. A trans-impedance gain of around 60 dB along with a 40 GHz bandwidth was achieved using the 0.13 mum 8M1P IBM CMOS process technology. The output noise voltage spectral density was 6 nV/radic(Hz), while, the input referred noise current spectral density was below 18 pA/radic(Hz) within the -3 dB bandwidth. Eye diagram simulations using a -53 dBm input photo-diode current signal and a 2³¹-1 pseudo random bit sequence data pattern, indicates an eye opening of 90% at 10 Gbit/s, 70% at 20 Gbit/sec, 50% at 40 Gbit/s and 30% at 60 Gbits/sec. This proposed RGC TIA is thus a robust building block for numerous optical transceiver applications with low bit error ratio (BER) figure.