Power-Bandwidth Trade-Off Analysis of Multi-Stage Inverter-Type Transimpedance Amplifier for Optical Communication

摘要

This paper discusses an analytical method for performance estimation of multi-stage transimpedance amplifier (TIA). For high speed and energy efficient optical communication, multi-stage TIA composed of pre-amplifier (PA) and Cherry-Hooper amplifier (CHA) are commonly used. However, it is not clear how to decide design parameters of PA and CHA. Additionally, the number of stages is also a design parameter. We propose an analytical performance estimation to achieve the highest bandwidth or the highest energy efficiency. To clear the impact of PA and CHA, we separate the impact of PA and CHA on the bandwidth. Our method shows trade-offs between the power and the bandwidth under various number of stages. The proposed method is verified with circuit simulation in a 65-nm CMOS technology. Results show that our method reveals the highest bandwidth and highest energy efficiency under various situations.