A 2.7V 9.8Gb/s Burst-Mode TIA with Fast Automatic Gain Locking and Coarse Threshold Extraction

Today's broadband access is moving towards PONs at 10Gb/s. This requires a burst-mode receiver to support the TDMA protocol used in its upstream path. Such a receiver consists of a burst-mode transimpedance amplifier (BM-TIA) which largely dictates the performance of the receiver and a burst-mode post-amplifier (BM-PA) that removes all dc-offsets present in the BM-TIA signal and regenerates the logical amplitude information. The BM-TIA is fabricated in a 0.25mum SiGe BiCMOS technology. The TIA is mounted together with a PIN photodiode in a butterfly package. These measurements show that the gain locking happens within 4.5ns from the start of the burst.