System-Level Specifications

Abstract

After this general introduction on short-distance fiber-optic communication systems, let us now focus on the receiver design. The receiver can be decomposed into several building blocks discussed below, which today are frequently integrated on separate dies (Figure 4.1). Commercial photodetectors are manufactured using III-V semiconductors like GaAs, InGaAs or InP. The transimpedance amplifiers, as well as the limiting amplifiers, use silicon or silicon–germanium (SiGe) bipolar processes to achieve a high bandwidth-power product. As clock recovery does not require the same gain-bandwidth product and is commonly built with logic gates, it is fabricated in standard CMOS. This technology based breakup remains more or less valid for the limited amount of currently available multichannel receiver solutions [27, 2].