A New Differential CMOS Current-Mode Preamplifier for GBps Data Communications

  • Authors:

  • Bendong Sun;Fei Yuan;Ajoy Opal

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper presents a new low-voltage fully differential CMOS current-mode preamplifier for GBps data communications. The number of transistors between the power and ground rails is only two so that the minimum supply voltage is one threshold voltage plus one pinch-off voltage. The preamplifier is a balanced two-stage configuration such that the effect of bias-dependent mismatches is minimized. A new inductive series-peaking technique is introduced to increase the bandwidth by utilizing the resonance characteristics of LC networks. In addition, a new negative differential current feedback technique is proposed to boost the bandwidth and to reduce the value of peaking inductors. The preamplifier has been implemented in TSMC 0.18 驴m, 1.8 V, 6-metal mixed-mode CMOS technology and analyzed using Spectre from Cadence Design Systems with BSIM3v3 device models. For an optical front-end with a 0.3 pF photodiode capacitance, simulation results demonstrate that the preamplifier has bandwidth of 3.5 GHz and provides a transimpedance gain of 66 dB驴. The total chip area is approximately 1 mm2 and the DC power consumption is about 85 mW.