High Linearity, Low Noise and High Gain Designs for Transimpedance Amplifier (TIA)

In the modern opto-electronic transceiver designs, the high-speed frontend circuits of the optical receivers are considerably focused on the circuit designs. Many different topologies have been published since the optical fiber was applied for transmitting high data rate signal. In the optical transceivers, the transimpedance amplifier (TIA) plays a critical role in converting the input current into output voltage and amplifying it. In order to get the high performance of the optical transceivers, the feedback TIA is critically required in the high-speed front-end circuit. The feedback TIA has a low noise, high gain in compared to other topologies such as open-loop TIA, fold-cascode TIA. However, there are some tradeoffs between the gain, bandwidth and linearity performance whenever the designers desire a really perfect TIA: low noise, high gain, high bandwidth and high linearity. This thesis emphasizes to extricate some trade-offs in the feedback TIA, a typical topology transimpedance amplifier.