100 Gbit/s co-designed optical receiver with hybrid integration

We demonstrate a co-designed optical receiver, which is hybrid-integrated with a silicon-photonic photodetector (PD) and silicon-germanium (SiGe) trans-impedance amplifier (TIA). Accurate equivalent circuit models of PD and electrical parasitic of chip-on-board (COB) assembly are built for co-simulation with TIA. Inductive peaking and equalizer (EQ) techniques are proposed in the design of TIA to extend the bandwidth of the optical receiver. The measured electrical 3-dB bandwidth of TIA and optical-to-electrical (O-E) 3-dB bandwidth of optical receiver are above 36.8 GHz and 36 GHz, respectively. For the optical receiver, clear eye diagrams up to a data rate of 80 Gbit/s are realized. The bit-error ratios (BER) for the NRZ signal with a different bit rate and received optical power are experimentally measured, and 100 Gbit/s NRZ operation is successfully achieved with a soft-decision forward error correction (SD-FEC) threshold.