10 Gb/s OEIC optical receiver front-end and 3.125 Gb/s PHEMT limiting amplifier

A 10 Gb/s OEIC (optoelectronic integrated circuit) optical receiver front-end has been studied and fabricated based on the Φ-76 mm GaAs PHEMT process; this is the first time that a limiting amplifier (LA) has been designed and realized using depletion mode PHEMT. An OEIC optical receiver front-end mode composed of an MSM photodiode and a current mode transimpedance amplifier (TIA) has been established and optimized by simulation software ATLAS. The photodiode has a bandwidth of 10 GHz, a capacitance of 3 fF/μm and a photosensitive area of 50 × 50 μm2. The whole chip has an area of 1511 × 666 μm2. The LA bandwidth is expanded by spiral inductance which has been simulated by software HFSS. The chip area is 1950 × 1910 μm2 and the measured results demonstrate an input dynamic range of 34 dB (10–500 mVpp) with constant output swing of 500 mVpp.