60 GHz Resonant Photoreceiver With an Integrated SiGe HBT Amplifier for Low Cost Analog Radio-Over-Fiber Links

• Published in: Journal of lightwave technology Vol. 39; no. 16; pp. 5307 - 5313
• Main Authors: Singh, Nishant, Torfs, Guy, Kerrebrouck, Joris Van, Caillaud, Christophe, Demeester, Piet, Yin, Xin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 15.08.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Amplification; Amplifier design; Amplifiers; BiCMOS integrated circuits; C band; Emitters; Gain; Impedance; Impedance matching; Input impedance; Low cost; Low noise; microwave amplifiers; microwave photonics; millimeter wave communication; millimeter wave radar; Narrowband; Noise; Noise levels; Photodiodes; Power consumption; Probes; Radio; Receivers & amplifiers; Resistors; Silicon germanides; Silicon germanium; Waveforms
• ISSN: 0733-8724; 1558-2213
• DOI: 10.1109/JLT.2021.3095522

An analog radio-over-fiber photoreceiver based on a resonant narrowband transimpedance low noise amplifier (TILNA) is proposed and demonstrated for use in low-cost and low-power remote radio heads for distributed antenna systems in the unlicensed 60 GHz band. The amplifier is designed to present a conjugate matched impedance to a wirebonded photodiode where the input impedance has a real part of 10<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">\mathrm{\Omega }</tex-math></inline-formula> while the output impedance is matched towards 50 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">\Omega</tex-math></inline-formula>. Fabricated in a 55 nm SiGe BiCMOS technology, the TILNA features a three stage common emitter low noise amplifier with 17 dB of gain, a 3.4 dB noise figure, an output 1-dB compression point of 8 dBm and low power consumption of 33.6 mW while occupying only 0.25 mm 2 of chip space including pads. The photoreceiver, formed by the TILNA and a wirebonded InP UTC photodiode, offers 29 dB higher gain than a 50 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">\Omega</tex-math></inline-formula> terminated reference photodiode where 11 dB improvement is provided by resonant matching. Experimental results show that the proposed photoreceiver has achieved up to 20Gbps C-band transmission of complex modulated waveforms over 5km of standard single-mode fiber using 4 Gbaud QAM32 with an RMS EVM of 11.5%.