An inductive buffered transimpedance amplifier stage for optical transceivers in 130nm CMOS

This paper presents a novel CMOS current feed-back inductive buffered trans-impedance amplifier (IBTIA) stage using the IBM 130 nm 8M2P CMOS process technology. Using the novel inductive buffer technique a 10 GHz bandwidth was achieved with a trans-impedance gain of ¿ 47 dB¿ without large gain peaking when compared to the inductive shunt peaking technique. In addition, the inductive buffer also provides an improved signal replica at the source-output at higher frequencies compared to an ordinary output buffer. The output noise voltage spectral density was 2 nV/¿Hz , while, the input referred noise current spectral density was below 10 pA/¿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 100% at 2 Gbits/s, 40% at 5 Gbits/sec and 8% at 11 Gbits/sec. This IBTIA is thus a robust building block for numerous optical transceiver applications with low bit error ratio (BER) figure.