<title>Low-cost silicon receiver OEICs</title>

Abstract

The state of the art of silicon optoelectronic integrated circuits (OEICs) is described. It is verified that silicon OEICs achieve both high sensitivities and high bandwidths up to the GHz range. Silicon OEICs,therefore, compete successfully with III/V OEICs for low-cost high-volume applications.Results of advanced monolithically integrated photodiodes available in CMOS and BiCMOS technologies are presented. The technological aspects for the monolithic integration of photodiodes are addressed and the properties of the so-called double photodiode and of the pin photodiode are described. The innovative integrated double photodiode allowing data rates of 622 Mb/s is available in standard silicon technologies without any process modification. For the integration of the pin photodiode allowing data rates of higher than 1 Gb/s usually at least one additional mask is required. It will be shown that the pin photodiode also can be implemented without an additional mask. The second main part of this article covers circuits of optical fiber and interconnect receivers with data rates of up to 1 Gb/s as well as advanced DVD pick-up OEICs with bandwidths of up to 150 MHz. The fiber receivers achieve an effective transimpedance of 45.9 k(Omega) and the sensitivity of this OEIC in a 1.0 micrometers CMOS technology with a data rate of 1 Gb/s is improved by 9 dB compared to that of a published OEIC in a 0.35 micrometers CMOS technolgy.