Ultra Low Power Transimpedance Amplifier Design for Receivers with Large-Area Photodetectors

This paper describes a novel transimpedance ampli-fier design for 1 Gbps, 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) scheme, and plastic optical fiber (POF) communications. The proposed transimpedance amplifier (TIA) takes in the current from a large photodetector with a 30 pF parasitic capacitance. The circuit exploits a flipped voltage follower (FVF) and global current feedback to operate up to 300 MHz with ultra-low static power. The TIA consumes only 80 µW static power under a 1 V supply voltage. The design is validated with simulations using a commercial 40 nm process technology.