Design improvements in distributed amplifiers for optical receiver front ends

Abstract

This paper reports circuit design improvements with respect to classical distributed transimpedance amplifiers for optical receiver front ends to obtain the highest gain and bandwidth performances using a low-cost MMIC technology. The design issues have been applied to the design of a front-end amplifier for optical links up to 10 Gb/s, and an effective transimpedance gain of 48 dB⍀ and a bandwidth from dc to 9 GHz are achieved.