High-speed, Monolithic CMOS Receivers with Ge on Si Waveguide Photodetectors

This paper describes Luxtera's approach to the monolithic integration of Germanium photodetectors with CMOS electronics for high speed optical transceivers. Insertion of the Germanium module into a CMOS process and its impact on the design of the detectors is discussed. The deployment of the devices in 4x10 Gbps receivers is also described, wherein an optical sensitivity of - 19 dBm for a bit error rate of 1e-12 is demonstrated. The optimization of the transimpedance amplifier to take advantage of the reduced capacitance (<20fF) of the waveguide detectors is also discussed.