A single-chip 200Mb/s fiber optic receiver circuit

Abstract

In the design of optical receivers, as in other areas of electronic design, it is desirable to integrate as much function as possible onto a single silicon chip. Using conventional designs, however, integrated receivers that have the large band widths needed to utilize 12 fully the performance of optical fibers have not been built 1,2 . This paper will describe an integrated optical receiver design that uses current mode amplification techniques and has allowed the integration of a 200Mb/s optical receiver onto a single silicon chip. The receiver circuit performs all of the necessary amplification and level restoration to generate ECL compatible logic outputs from a PIN photodiode input.