Design of Thin-Film Lateral SOI PIN Photodiodes with up to Tens of GHz Bandwidth

Design of Multi Gb/s Monolithically Integrated Photodiodes and Multi-Stage Transimpedance Amplifiers in Thin-Film SOI CMOS Technology

“….A (1) in which C ph is the total photodiode capacitance and C inA is the input capacitance of the voltage amplifier. The bandwidth of this simple receiver is thus given by:…”

“…SOI has here an advantage over other Si integrated technologies for high speed applications (e.g. 10 GBps) because both the photodiode and the amplifier will have smaller capacitances, and also because SOI photodiodes themselves can achieve such high transit time frequencies [1].…”

“…The development of new integrated high-speed Si receivers is requested for short distance optical data link and emerging optical storage (OS) systems, notably for the Gb/s Ethernet standard [1] - [8] and Blue DVD (Blu-Ray, HDDVD) [3], [4], [9]. As requirements on bandwidth, gain, power consumption as well as low read-out noise and cost are quite severe, an optimal design strategy of a monolithically integrated solution, i.e.…”

“…Some solutions exist but at the price of more costly and complex fabrication processes [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. At the system level, owing to its low dark current (pA range) [17], low capacitor (10fF) for the photodetector [1] and possibility to integrate this detector with high-performance low-capacitance transistors, global thin-film SOI monolithically integrated photoreceivers have potentially higher gain and lower noise performances which in turn, as we will show here, can increase the IC-sensitivity and alleviate this requirement on the photodetector itself. Furthermore only SOI photodiodes have so far achieved bandwidth compatible with the 10Gb/ s specification and even higher data rate among the "easy to integrate" Si photodetectors [1], [15], [16] and [18].…”

“…In the blue and UV wavelengths, these diodes achieve a high responsivity [17] and then combine all the advantages of high speed, low dark current and finally high sensitivity [1]. This makes SOI receivers the best candidate for blue DVD applications and future optical storage generation.…”