Abstract
Due to the progress in technology, high-speed data transmission is highly demanded. In the traditional wire communication, the signal suffers high loss from transmission medium as the data-rate increases. However, replacing the traditional transmission medium by optical fiber provide the advantage of wide bandwidth and low noise. Therefore, short-distance optical communication plays a major role in high-speed data transmission. Among the problems about fully integration of optical receiver on a single chip, one of the difficult challenges is the limit of bandwidth due to the size of photodetector. To increase photocurrent makes the size of the photodiode (PD) larger. However, the parasitic capacitance of the PD will become larger and directly affect the bandwidth of the whole optical receiver. This thesis proposes an inductorless front-end amplifier, fabricated in TSMC 0.18 m CMOS technology, for 10 Gb/s optical receiver under the condition of 1 pF parasitic capacitance of the PD. The chip integrates a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and a limiting amplifier (LA). By employing shunt-shunt feedback, active inductor, and active feedback, this work broadens the bandwidth. Besides, the interleaving feedback in the circuit not only splits the poles but also make the frequency response flat. Conventional off-chip capacitors are replaced by differential active Miller capacitors (DAMC) in this work in order to achieve an area-efficient design and to avoid off-chip noise.