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 dBñ 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.