A 26-Gb/s 3-D-integrated silicon photonic receiver in bicmos-55 nm and pic25g with-15.2-dbm oma sensitivity

This letter presents a 3-D-integrated 26 Gb/s opto-electrical receiver front-end. The electronic integrated circuit (EIC) is fabricated in a BiCMOS-55-nm technology, flipped and placed on top of the photonic integrated circuits (PICs) die through copper pillars. In the receiver chain, a fully differential shunt-feedback TI amplifier (FD-SF TIA) is followed by a limiting amplifiers (LAs) with embedded equalization, output driver and an automatic offset cancelation loop. The whole receiver provides a transimpedance (TI) gain of 76 dB Ω with 30-GHz bandwidth. By exploiting the FD-SF TIA with low parasitic capacitance of the Germanium dual heterojunction photo diode (Ge-PD) in the photonic die, the receiver achieves sensitivity of-15.2 dBm optical modulation amplitude (OMA) at Ge-PD and-10-dBm OMA at the single-mode fiber (SMF) optical output with bit error rate of 10-12 and PRBS 15. The sensitivity is aligned with state-of-the-art receivers employing discrete photonics and, to author's best knowledge, it is the lowest reported among published 25 Gb/s receivers exploiting silicon photonics.